Neuralink has demonstrated new features designed to help people with severe speech impairments make phone calls, control a Grok AI agent through imagined speech, and communicate without manually activating a speech decoder.

The Elon Musk-founded company also tested brain-controlled dictation across iPhone apps, allowing users to enter text without relying on conventional keyboards.

The developments are part of Neuralink’s experimental brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which translates neural signals associated with intended speech into words.

The company demonstrated the features with a participant in its VOICE clinical study, which focuses on restoring communication for people who have lost the ability to speak.

One of the new features allows users to activate a Grok AI agent by imagining themselves saying “Hey Neuralink,” followed by a command.

The agent then carries out the requested task autonomously on a computer. Neuralink described the integration as an early demonstration of how brain-computer interfaces could enable more direct interaction with AI-powered systems.

The company also developed a neural voice activity detection system that automatically recognizes when a participant intends to speak.

Previously, users had to press a button to start and stop recording neural activity for speech decoding. The new system detects when the user is attempting to speak and automatically starts or stops the decoding process.

This could reduce the need for physical controls and make communication more accessible to people with severe movement limitations.

Neuralink also introduced real-time visualizations that display the intensity and distribution of neural signals recorded by the implant.

These visualizations allow participants to experiment with different imagined speaking patterns and identify those that produce stronger neural activity, potentially helping improve speech-decoding performance.

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