# Grok Provides Voice Mode as Downloads of the Grok App Ramp Up

xAI’s newest Grok replace appears to be going properly, with downloads of the standalone Grok app rising 10X within the week following the launch of Grok 3, whereas every day lively customers of the app additionally jumped 5x week-over-week.

That’s in line with the most recent information from Sensor Tower (as first reported by TechCrunch), although the true utilization developments might be extra indicative after a couple of months, as soon as the novelty of the launch has settled, and the utility of Grok’s useful updates are extra evident.

xAI claims that its newest Grok 3 mannequin is probably the most superior AI system available on the market, which it hopes will drive extra individuals to enroll to X Premium so as to entry its evolving AI instruments. X can also be providing a brand new SuperGrok entry tier to make the most of all the system’s newest capabilities.

And the Grok updates are nonetheless coming, with X and xAI proprietor Elon Musk saying that voice mode for Grok is now obtainable to top-paying X Premium clients.

So now you’ll be able to ask questions aloud to Grok, and have it reply by studying its responses through an AI-generated voice.

xAI lately famous that voice mode was one of many secondary parts it was engaged on for the Grok 3 launch, and it’s now seeking to make it obtainable to customers, including another choice for partaking with its AI chatbot.

Grok’s additionally obtained a brand new brand, which is seemingly one among a number of Grok brand variants floating across the app, however is now the principle one displayed on the Grok profile on X.

And together with Elon’s authorities rationalization efforts, which might ultimately see xAI built-in into authorities processes to maximise effectivity, the indicators are wanting optimistic for Elon’s AI ambitions.

Properly, a minimum of till Meta and OpenAI launch new, extra highly effective fashions that blow Grok out of the water, that’s.

Which has at all times been the complicated side of Elon’s AI efforts, that he’s going up in opposition to rather more well-resourced, well-established gamers available in the market, whose apps see rather more utilization than X.

Even with the Grok app’s development, the general curiosity in Grok has been pretty lukewarm. And with Meta lately reporting that its personal AI chatbot now has 700 million month-to-month lively customers, greater than X’s complete viewers, it’s nonetheless arduous to see how xAI and Musk plan to maintain Grok related and precious in the long term.

Once more, the federal government integration push looks as if probably the most viable pathway. Conflicting pursuits apart, it appears probably that Musk’s inside operating, through his work with the brand new DOGE group, will give xAI a bonus in constructing an AI system that may help in authorities companies.

If Elon can construct that connection, that xAI will safe ongoing funding, for the subsequent 4 years a minimum of, however outdoors of that, I’m unsure that there’s a heap of market demand for a “non-woke” AI chatbot, a minimum of to not the extent that xAI would wish to construct a sustainable enterprise.

Additionally, smaller tales like this don’t assist:

“Grok quickly refused to reply with “sources that point out Elon Musk/Donald Trump unfold misinformation,” in line with xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok customers observed that the chatbot had been given directions to not reply with these outcomes, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI worker at xAI for updating Grok’s system immediate with out approval.”

The truth that X is ready to censor and weight its Grok mannequin to profit the picture of its founder, and his political ardour initiatives, looks as if a big concern, particularly given Musk and X’s repeated criticism of everyone else for spreading lies and manipulating the reality.

xAI says that this was a easy error, that was rapidly corrected. However taken together with X’s different censorship efforts, like silencing journalists on the behest of sure governments, eradicating checkmarks (and thus attain) from individuals who criticize Elon, and throttling the attain of hyperlinks to publications that Musk himself doesn’t agree with, it definitely belies Musk’s public push for freedom of speech and open dialogue.

That, irrespective of the way you take a look at it, just isn’t what X is about. And whereas the counter to that is that earlier Twitter administration was left-leaning, and that that is merely redressing the stability, a real redress of such just isn’t the other, in suppressing views that don’t align with right-wing speaking factors.

Not that it appears to matter a lot to Elon’s supporters, who nonetheless take all the pieces that he says at face worth, and align together with his view that free speech means having the ability to weight the scales with reference to what’s true and what’s not.

Altering Grok’s solutions is simply one other instance of this, which they’ll dismiss as an harmless mistake, whereas overlooking the truth that Musk is now doing this in all facets.