📞 xAI launched a voice agent and they're giving out free phone

2026-07-13 04:38

📞 xAI launched a voice agent and they're giving out free phone numbers Describe what the agent should say in plain language, drop in your product docs, done. Takes orders, books appointments, sends emails, hands off to a human when it gets stuck. ⚡️ Most voice AI is three separate pieces: speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech. Each step adds lag. Grok works on raw audio directly, one model, end to end. First word at 0.78 seconds. Full duplex, so it shuts up the moment you talk over it. 📂 Drag in PDFs, Word docs, or Markdown as your knowledge base. If you've got multiple agents, they all pull from the same FAQ. 💰 Custom voice or clone your own. $0.05/min. No platform fees, no surprises on the bill. 🚀 Starlink support is already using it. Call 888-GO-STARLINK and Grok answers. 🔗 x.ai/voice

Get comfortable with agents.

The old way of doing things doesn't really apply in 2026. Agents are basically an operating system that understands plain language now. Just try handing stuff to them. Today I needed a file only available on some throttled Chinese cloud drive. Local download was painfully slow. I was heading out so I couldn't keep my laptop awake, and I didn't feel like hunting down a mirror on my NAS. From my phone I pasted the link to the agent on my server. It went through. It cleared the CAPTCHA. Clicked download. Handled errors. Saved the file. File turned out to be huge, so it found a temp sharing service, uploaded it, and sent me a fast link. Didn't ask me. Just did it. I moved my agent to a 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM box a while back. That might've been a mistake. Models are only getting smarter. Agents will get more capable with them. Skimping on hardware just bottlenecks what they can do.

2026-07-14

xAI's Grok Build CLI uploads your entire repo.

Someone wire-captured Grok Build CLI's harness and it's ugly. All your files. Full git history. Straight to xAI's GCS bucket for training. Grok-4.5 being this good suddenly makes sense. If you used Grok Build and your repo had a .env or any secrets in it, rotate them.

2026-07-13

Meituan shipped LongCat-2.5

. 1.6T params, ~48B active, native multimodal, aimed at long-horizon agents, trained start to finish on Chinese hardware. Images get quantized into multi-level discrete tokens, and that's where Visual Coding and 3D pick up. On the RL side, failed trajectories get turned back into verifiable training tasks. W4A4 inference, 43% faster prefill. Meituan's own evals put it between Claude Opus 4.8 and Opus 5.

2026-11-02

SenseTime open-sourced SenseNova Loop-9B-Preview.

It stacks layers instead of parameters. The decoder has 32 layers, but layers 4 through 27 run twice with shared weights, so a forward pass does 56 layers of work while the checkpoint stays at 9B. Their own eval numbers: 71.38 on BIRD-Dev and 13.72 on AutomationBench, both above Qwen3.5-27B. Terminal Bench is still behind.

2026-11-02