Search “Speech”

ElevenLabs partners with Spain's adELA to provide free voice restoration for ALS patients

ElevenLabs announced a partnership with the Spanish ALS association adELA to give ALS patients diagnosed in Spain free access to its voice restoration and preservation technology. This is the first project of the ElevenLabs Impact Program in Spain, and Spain is the first country to offer this technology through a nationwide patient association. Patients whose speech has not yet noticeably changed can record new samples, while those whose speech has changed can upload old recordings to generate their own digital voice. It is estimated that there are approximately 4,000–4,500 ALS patients in Spain, many of whom will eventually lose the ability to speak.

Scammers used AI to clone a daughter's voice and fake a kidnapping; voice experts recommend that families set up a safety code word

Fortune reported that Deborah Del Mastro, a mother in Martinez, California, received a call in May from someone posing as a Mexican drug cartel; the caller played an AI-cloned recording of her daughter crying and screaming. Following instructions, she wired $5,400 to Mexico from multiple locations within five hours, only to later discover that her daughter had been at work the whole time. McAfee tests show that a mere three-second voice sample is enough to generate a clone that matches the original voice by 85%; a Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey estimates that in 2025 about 15 million American adults were scammed, with losses of about $68 billion, 12% of which involved AI or deepfakes. Kimberly Hyun, an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, recommends that family members agree on a code word known only to each other, and that when receiving a call from an unknown number claiming a family member is in trouble, they should hang up immediately and call that person back directly to verify.

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Neuralink Publishes Early VOICE Project Data: ALS Patient Reaches 75 Words Per Minute Output in First Week After Implant

Neuralink released a blog post on October 28, publicly disclosing the early feasibility study of its speech restoration project VOICE. One participant with ALS reached an output rate of 75 words per minute in the first week of use, with a word error rate of 5.8% on a large vocabulary of 125,000 words. The study's lead investigator, Dr. Nader Pouratian, has presented the relevant data at the 2026 NEALS annual meeting. The study plans to enroll approximately 6 participants who have lost the ability to communicate due to ALS, spinal cord injury, or stroke, and its primary endpoint is device- or procedure-related adverse events within 12 months after implantation. Neuralink has not yet published a complete peer-reviewed paper; the figures come from a single participant, and the company has not explained the types of test tasks, the separate performance of text versus speech output, or long-term effects.

Deepgram Acquires Pipecat Developer Daily and Launches Real-Time Context Standard RCS

Deepgram announced the acquisition of Daily, the developer of the open-source voice AI framework Pipecat, for an undisclosed sum, with both parties committing that Pipecat will remain open source. Daily had previously raised more than $62 million in cumulative funding, and Deepgram became a unicorn earlier this year with a $130 million Series C round. Deepgram also released the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol developed jointly with the Pipecat team to define metadata such as audio context, model instructions, and response tone in voice agents.

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