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Tag: Noland-Arbaugh

2 articles

Industry News

Neuralink cuts some implant users' calibration from 10 minutes a day to 10 minutes a week

Neuralink said on 1 October 2026 that participants in its clinical trial have streamed more than 50,000 hours of unlabelled brain recordings during everyday use of its implant, and that it has used participants' own recordings to pretrain participant-specific models that steady the software turning brain signals into cursor movement. Calibration had averaged 55 minutes a week across participants, typically 10 minutes at the start of each day; some participants now calibrate for 10 minutes a week. Six participants set personal bests on Neuralink's cursor test, and one reached 11.32 bits per second, which the company calls a record for a brain-computer interface. Every live result came from a model trained on a single participant's data, and models pooled across participants have not yet performed better. Neuralink's stated next goals are calibrating once, never calibrating, and a shared 'API for the motor cortex' for developers.

Oct 3

Industry News

Neuralink discloses direct thought-to-audio speech decoding in ALS participant Terry, the VOICE trial's third implantee

Neuralink published a video this week showing Terry, a married man with bulbar-onset ALS, saying 'Hello, how are you doing today?' and 'I, I love you' to his wife through an implanted N1 brain-computer interface. The output routed through Grok Voice, xAI's speech engine, using a clone of Terry's own pre-ALS recordings. It is Neuralink's most detailed publicly disclosed thought-to-speech demonstration to date and the first to route through xAI's Grok Voice engine for personalised voice synthesis. Another VOICE participant, Kenneth Shock, appeared in a Neuralink clip on 16 September 2026, two days before Terry's disclosure, saying 'I love you' to his wife. Terry is the third participant in Neuralink's VOICE early-feasibility trial (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07224256), formally titled 'VOICE: An Early Feasibility Study of a Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface for Communication Restoration.' VOICE is a separate protocol from Neuralink's PRIME motor-decoding trial and its CAN-PRIME and GB-PRIME international arms. The N1 implant holds an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation; it is not FDA-approved and not commercially available. Prior Neuralink participants Noland Arbaugh (PRIME P1), Alex (PRIME P2), and Brad Smith (PRIME first ALS participant) are on the motor decoding track. Brad Smith's earlier speech restoration used cursor-typed text through a cloned voice; Terry's demonstration is the first Neuralink disclosure of direct neural-to-audio decoding. Neuralink has not published words-per-minute, word-error-rate, latency, or vocabulary-size metrics. No peer-reviewed methods paper accompanies the demonstration.

Sep 23