Cyborg 21 is me — Kenneth Shock. I live in Alberta, Canada, and I have ALS. I was born in Spokane, Washington, and I am a US/Canada dual citizen; I am presently not a resident of the United States. I am the 21st person to receive a Neuralink N1 implant, and the second participant in Neuralink’s VOICE trial: an early feasibility study of speech restoration with a brain-computer interface — turning intended speech into text or audible speech for people who have lost or are losing their voice.
ALS stole my natural speaking voice. The implant is helping me get communication back. It does not cure ALS. It does not restore walking, breathing, or swallowing. The device is investigational, not commercially approved, and I am a trial participant — not a Neuralink employee or spokesman.
VOICE is separate from PRIME, also known as Telepathy (the cursor and device-control studies). My implant was placed in January 2026 at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Training moved from speaking, to silently mouthing, to thinking words. Company videos have shown thought-to-speech in a reconstruction of my own pre-ALS voice, including saying “I love you” to my wife. Earlier versions of that reconstructed voice came from ElevenLabs; Grok currently provides my AI-reconstructed voice. The system still needs a large amount of labeled training data. Thought-to-speech is not a finished product.
Day to day with ALS and VOICE looks like this: connect via Bluetooth, do data collection (training) as needed — the software does not prompt me to train — then choose speech mode or dictation mode with a button press when I begin the thought-to-output process. Speech mode produces audible words in my reconstructed voice; dictation mode produces text. It is slower and messier than a healthy conversation. It is also communication that does not depend on leftover mouth or hand muscle the way eye-gaze or a mouth stick does. That is the help.
I write the longer version on Substack at I Am Cyborg 21 (kennethshock.com). The short version is on X as @Cyborg21. My line is simple: ALS sucks. My life doesn’t.
If you searched “Who is Cyborg 21?” because you saw the handle, heard “21 Neuralink participants,” or watched a VOICE / speech-restoration demo — that is the answer. Other Neuralink participants you may know (Noland Arbaugh / P1, Brad Smith, Jake Schneider, Terry Mandable, and others) are in related trials. I am the public VOICE participant who goes by Cyborg 21, from Alberta.