ALS Patient Speaks Again After Neuralink Turns His Thoughts Into Spoken Words

Neuralink has shared a new video of Terry, an ALS patient and the third participant in its VOICE clinical trial, producing speech by thought alone and ending with an emotional “I, I love you” to his wife.

Terry is an extrovert who loves to talk, which makes his bulbar-onset ALS diagnosis especially cruel. The variant attacks speech and swallowing first, and his wife says watching it steal his voice has been heartbreaking. “That is part of his identity that now is no longer there because of the ALS,” she says.

He had recently made partner and was at the apex of his career when his speech began to slur at business dinners. His wife would tease him, “How much wine did you have with dinner?” and he would reply, “I didn’t have any wine.” He was eventually placed on long-term disability and retired from the career he loved, while her biggest fear became losing the ability to communicate with him at all.

“Losing my voice has affected me in a lot of ways,” Terry says. “I hope this will allow me to be a part of the conversation again.” Once the couple learned about the study, the decision was simple. “It just seems like it is a no brainer,” his wife says. “He needs to have his voice, and this can give him that.”

Engineers implanted the device in his speech motor region, where 3,000 recording channels pick up his neural signals in a real-time view. When Terry attempted to speak, the channels lit up with activity, and his first successful output was the programmers’ classic: “hello world.” From there, the team built a decoder that translates his neural signals into intended speech in his own natural voice.

Then came the moment that mattered. Speaking through the computer speakers, Terry said, “Hello, how are you doing today?” “You just got your voice back,” the team told him. For his wife, it was a game changer: “To just be able to have a conversation with my husband, this means the world to us.”

The milestone lands close to home. Canada was the first country outside the US approved for Neuralink’s human trials, with Health Canada signing off on the CAN-PRIME study in late 2024 and Toronto Western Hospital as the only site. Vancouver police Sgt. Lee Marten, who also has ALS, got his implant there on May 20, 2026, becoming the 26th person with a Neuralink device.

Cursor control by thought is the older half of the story. First patient Noland Arbaugh showed in March 2024 he could move a cursor on his MacBook Pro, play chess and Civilization VI, without lifting a finger. The implant talks to a MacBook or iPhone over Bluetooth and charges wirelessly with an inductive charger.

The video was posted Friday and has passed 6.3 million views. Neuralink notes its devices are investigational and not FDA approved, and that trial participants are volunteers.

VOICE runs alongside the Telepathy cursor-control work, and wider availability is years away. The nearer milestone for Canadians is Marten’s progress in Toronto.