Neuralink shows a trial participant speaking through his implant

Neuralink published a video on 18 September 2026 showing Terry, a participant in its VOICE trial who lost the ability to speak to ALS, producing audible words through his implant. He trained the decoder first by miming speech as well as he could, then by thinking the words and hearing them spoken back. The output is rendered by Grok Voice, from xAI, in a reconstruction of his own pre-illness voice.

The trial is registered as NCT07224256. Neuralink Corp is the sponsor, the study opened on 3 October 2025 at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and it is an early feasibility study with a planned enrollment of six. The registry describes the N1 implant as a skull-mounted wireless device connected to electrode threads placed by the R1 robot, indicated for adults with severe and irreversible impairment of speech production. Listed conditions include ALS, stroke, cervical spinal cord injury and tetraplegia.

What the company has not published is the measurement. There are no peer-reviewed figures for decoding accuracy, latency or vocabulary size, no implant date for Terry, and no count of how many VOICE participants are active. Independent coverage of the video describes a delay of several seconds between intention and audible output. The video is a demonstration, not a trial result.