According to DARPA, the project "will allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through neural signals analysis.
These imagined speech signals would be analyzed and translated into distinct words allowing covert person-to-person communication.
Presumably, "thinking in the form of sound" recruits auditory and language areas whose activation profiles may be extracted from the EEG, given adequate processing.
In these circumstances it is possible to partially decode the acoustic envelope of speech message from neural timeseries if the listener is induced to think in the form of sound.
In imagined speech detection, equal levels of activity commonly occur in both the left and right hemispheres simultaneously.
This is because the anatomical details of people's heads will differ; therefore, the signals recorded will vary in each subject, regardless of individuals-specific imagined speech characteristics.