Inner Speech Decoding: A Comprehensive Review

ABSTRACT Inner speech decoding is the process of identifying silently generated speech from neural signals. In recent years, this candidate technology has gained momentum as a possible way to support communication in severely impaired populations. Specifically, this approach promises hope for people with a variety of physical or neurological disabilities who need alternative means of verbal expression. This review covers recording modalities that range from the noninvasive EEG to the high‐density electrocorticography and discusses how linear discriminant analysis, deep convolutional networks, and hybrid fusion of EEG with fMRI are integrated into machine learning strategies to infer covert speech. This review synthesizes evidence to suggest that small vocabularies, under controlled conditions, can yield relatively reasonable accuracy while further refining the decoding outcome via context‐based approaches. The impact of sensor quality, training data size, and domain adaptation is illustrated by focusing on public datasets of imagined or articulated speech. Throughout the article, the methodological standards emerging across laboratories will be discussed, emphasizing that effective inner speech recognition involves high‐quality preprocessing, subject calibration, and informed modeling choices balanced against computational power for interpretability. In addition to technical advancements, this review also examines the ethical, societal, and regulatory challenges surrounding inner speech decoding, including brain data privacy, neural rights, informed consent, and user trust. Addressing these interdisciplinary issues is critical for the responsible development and real‐world adoption of such technologies. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Computation Computer Science and Robotics > Machine Learning