To retrieve the information from the serious distorted received signal is the key challenge of communication signal processing. The chaotic baseband communication promises theoretically to eliminate the inter-symbol interference (ISI), however, it needs complicated calculation, if it is not impossible. In this paper, a genetic algorithm support vector machine (GA-SVM) based symbol detection method is proposed for chaotic baseband wireless communication system (CBWCS), by this way, treating the problem from a different viewpoint, the symbol decoding process is converted to be a binary classification through GA-SVM model. A trained GA-SVM model is used to decode the symbols directly at the receiver, so as to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of the CBWCS and simplify the symbol detection process by removing the channel identification and the threshold calculation process as compared to that using the calculated threshold to decode symbol in the traditional methods. The simulation results show that the proposed method has better BER performance in both the static and time-varying wireless channels. The experimental results, based on the wireless open-access research platform, indicate that the BER of the proposed GA-SVM based symbol detection approach is superior to the other counterparts under a practical wireless multipath channel.