A Common Measure of Communication for Speech Brain-Computer Interfaces

The paper introduces Open‑Vocabulary Mutual Information (OVMI), an information‑theoretic metric that quantifies how much of a user’s intended speech a speech brain‑computer interface (BCI) can convey relative to a reference word distribution. OVMI enables comparison of systems that use different vocabularies, recording methods, and datasets, revealing that conventional metrics like accuracy and word error rate can overstate performance. Using OVMI, the authors compare existing speech BCI systems, expose trade‑offs between vocabulary coverage and decoding accuracy, and show that optimizing vocabulary selection for OVMI can improve accuracy by up to 16.3% across three speech domains.

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