Are there any EEG procedures currently available/in development that can formulate letters/words from deliberate, internal monologue? I am thinking of the combination of an EEG-like device and software to monitor and analyze (very) deliberate thoughts of letters/words. 

The input would be in the form of raw electrical brain activity from the EEG and the output from the software analysis would be in the form of text (the pattern-matched words/letters). 

The software would be trained to recognize specific patterns of electrical impulses and form conclusions on what letter/word matches the best. 

I have been interested in the idea of an input-less and effort-less HID such as this for a while now, mainly for personal enjoyment--I've entertained thoughts of working on documents with vim on the bed with a projector aimed at the ceiling--but realize that something like this would be of immense help to the disabled too. 

I'm confident that teams are working right now on such problems, but my searches have yielded no results. 

Here are some of my questions.


Can anyone direct me to some relevant articles and papers? 
What is the current state of progress regarding the formulation of useful information from neural firing patterns and raw brain activity? 
Are current EEG and other-brain scanning devices available right now capable enough to detect and form distinctions between impulses such as the internalization of, say, letters "K" vs "F"?. 


Can something like the OpenBCI do this?
Can something like the Emotiv system do this? They have two models, the "EPOC / EPOC+" and "Insight". The former offers 14 EEG channels while the latter offers only 5. Is 5 sufficient for such purposes?

Is it a problem of insufficient hardware sensing resolution or the inability to pattern match such noisy data? 


I looked at this post too but it did not answer my questions: Can we draw conclusions about content of thoughts from neural firing patterns?



Found some interesting links


OpenEEG, but it looks dead now
Very promising and exactly what I was looking for: OpenBCI, An Open Source Brain-Computer Interface For Makers
More EEG info: Selecting an EEG Device
Emotiv EEGs, also looks promising: Are recent affordable EEG devices any good?
More discussion in a reddit thread here
What you are looking for is Imagined / Silent Speech Classification (my best guess). I'm interested in this for a few years (exactly to work with Vim) now and  worked with some of the cheap EEG headsets like Emotiv EPOC and Neurosky MindWave Mobile. 

A paper on it:
http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ABSE/papers/1021

Patent applications:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/
To the above link, add these at the end:
WO2014066855A1.html
WO2014130571A1.html

(Due to a lack of reputation, I cannot post more than 2 links.)

The commercial and inexpensive headsets are good enough to detect what their APIs support:
Neurosky: Attention, Meditation and Eye blink.
EPOC: Please refer to their Cognitive Suit documentation. You can get 1-2 sets of detections done quickly. Good luck with detecting 4 states.

Search around for Silent Speech Classification. You should be able to find more details. There was a Japanese demo somewhere that uses classification on EEG or EMG to speak. I will post it if I can find it.