Well, yes it is technically correct that a CI will not directly produce speech. But to produce speech you need to be able to hear and this is what the CI is designed to do so as to allow an easier path to speech acquisition.
When you look at the whole purpose and intent of the CI in children and all the broohaha with doing it early on, it's all about facilitating development of speech, which is very difficult to do unless you can hear to some degree.
