Neuralink Reaches 26 Brain-Implant Recipients With Outdoor Wheelchair Control and 75-WPM Speech Decoding

At least 26 clinical trial participants have received Neuralink's intracortical N1 brain-computer interface (BCI) implant as of November 2026, with recent milestones spanning outdoor powered-wheelchair driving, assistive robotic-arm control, and 75-word-per-minute speech decoding, Neurofounders' Mishti Broor reported on November 12, 2026.

In November 2026, participant Jake Schneider—who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—shared video demonstrating outdoor powered-wheelchair steering, acceleration, and reversing using his N1 implant so he can take walks with his son, while CONVOY study participant Nick Wray used neural signals to operate an assistive robotic arm to feed himself and serve drinks. In Neuralink's VOICE clinical study, an ALS participant achieved speech decoding at 75 words per minute with a 5.8% word error rate across a 125,000-word vocabulary during the first week of testing.

In October 2026, Neuralink also trained a brain foundation model on more than 50,000 hours of intracortical neural recordings, cutting user recalibration time from 10 minutes per day to 10 minutes per week, while UK trial participant Sebastian Gomez—a medical student—uses his implant up to 17 hours daily.