Neuralink says an ALS patient reached 75 words a minute with its speech implant

By Inside BCI · Edited by Velco Dar · October 29, 2026

People with ALS can lose the ability to speak while their thinking stays intact. On 28 October Neuralink said its implant turned one trial participant’s brain signals into text at 75 words a minute in their first week, with about 94 of every 100 words right.

What Neuralink reported

In a post on X, Neuralink said it is enabling speech to text and voice at conversational rates for participants with ALS. One participant reached 75 words per minute with a 5.8 per cent word error rate, the share of words the system gets wrong, on a 125,000-word vocabulary during their first week. The company did not name the participant, say how many people contributed data, describe the task, or, as of 29 October, publish a paper or blog post with the results.

The data comes from VOICE, Neuralink’s early feasibility study of its implant for restoring communication. The study began on 3 October 2025 at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where neurosurgeon Nader Pouratian is principal investigator, and aims to enrol six people with conditions including ALS, spinal cord injury and stroke. Its primary measures are safety: the share of participants with device-related or procedure-related adverse events at 12 months. Speech performance is a secondary measure, recorded as the monthly maximum of correct words per minute. Neuralink said in May 2025 that the US Food and Drug Administration had given its speech implant Breakthrough Device designation.

Earlier VOICE updates came without figures. In September Neuralink posted clips of VOICE participants with ALS speaking to their wives in synthesised voices decoded from their neural signals, including a third participant, Terry.

How it compares

The published benchmarks on a 125,000-word vocabulary each come from a single participant with ALS and implanted microelectrode arrays. In 2023 a Stanford-led BrainGate team reported 62 words per minute with a 23.8 per cent word error rate, against about 160 words per minute for natural conversation. In 2024 a UC Davis team reported 90.2 per cent accuracy on its second day of use and 97.5 per cent sustained over 8.4 months, at about 32 words per minute. In June 2026 the same UC Davis team reported more than 3,800 hours of use at home at an average of 56 words per minute. When the participant repeated prompted sentences, accuracy topped 99 per cent at about 31 words per minute, and reached 96.5 per cent at about 50 words per minute when he mouthed words silently.

Neuralink’s 75 words per minute is faster than any of those published figures, though the company did not say whether it was a peak or an average, and the trial’s own speech measure is a monthly maximum. A UCSF team reported a median 78 words per minute in 2023 on a smaller 1,024-word vocabulary. Neuralink’s accuracy of about 94 per cent is below UC Davis’s sustained figures, and its result covers one week, from a company post that has not been peer-reviewed.

Why it matters

Several implant makers are now targeting speech for people who cannot talk. Paradromics said in September that the first participant in its Connect-One study had spoken her own words in real time through its Connexus implant, without giving speed or word error rate figures. Neuralink’s post gives clinicians and investors a company-reported speed and error rate to set against the published academic record.

Not disclosed

Neuralink has not disclosed how many VOICE participants are decoding speech, whether the 75 words per minute was a peak or an average, whether the sentences were prompted or freely chosen, how the error rate was measured, or how results held up after the first week.

What to watch

Whether Neuralink publishes the VOICE speech results in a peer-reviewed journal.

Whether later VOICE updates report average rates over months.

Whether other participants reach similar speeds.

Whether Paradromics or other implant makers publish speed and error figures for speech.

Sources

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Cross-reference to prior InsideBCI coverage:

news Neuralink VOICE-trial speech-restoration ALS UT-Southwestern Nader-Pouratian UC-Davis Stanford BrainGate word-error-rate Paradromics