SpaceXSI launches Grok Voice 3.0, tops speech index

Elon Musk's AI company launched Grok Voice 3.0 on Oct. 14. The new speech-to-speech model is built for voice agents that handle customer support and sales calls, and it debuted at No. 1 on Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Index. The company's launch post says the model is available now in the Voice Agent API at $0.08 per minute, or $4.80 per hour. That is the same price as Grok Voice 2.0. SiliconANGLE says the company now goes by SpaceXSI and was formerly called xAI. Its pitch is aimed at a call-center industry that is already shrinking.benzinga.com+1

Benchmark lead

Artificial Analysis gave Grok Voice 3.0 a score of 86.9 on its index. That beats GPT-Live-1 (Astra, medium) at 83.2 and Gemini 3.8 Live from Google Alphabet Inc. ↘ 1.68% at 82.6. It is also up 5.6 points from Grok Voice 2.0's 81.3. The model ranked first on task success at 94.8% and scored 98.5% on Big Bench Audio reasoning. In head-to-head preference voting, it placed third with an Elo of 1,070.x.com

The model does not lead every test. OpenAI's model kept a narrow lead on Tau-Voice, a benchmark built from support calls with heavy accents and background noise, scoring 74.5% to Grok's 71.6%, SiliconANGLE reported. Grok Voice 3.0 produced its first audio in 0.81 seconds on average. That is faster than its competitors but slower than Grok Voice 2.0's 0.70 seconds, according to Artificial Analysis. The company also said the model scored highest for accuracy, at 74%, on ServiceNow's ↗ 0.99% EVA-Bench for enterprise voice agents.siliconangle.com+2

Artificial Analysis estimated the cost of one task at about $0.025, compared with $0.030 for GPT-Live-1 and $0.055 for GPT-Realtime-2.1, TheStreet reported. On hourly price, Grok costs more than Gemini 3.8 Live, at $3.50, but less than GPT-Live-1 Astra, at $5.83.thestreet.com+1

Starlink and Tesla

According to the company, Starlink call centers use Grok Voice for about 20,000 calls a day and resolve roughly 70% of them without a human. It also says one in four sales calls ends in a purchase, TheStreet reported. A single agent can verify customers, troubleshoot hardware, issue credits and ship replacement equipment. The company also says the model handles millions of conversations a day in Tesla ↘ 2.15% vehicles, Unite.AI noted.unite.ai+1

Developers whose agents use the grok-voice-latest alias were moved to the new model automatically, SiliconANGLE reported.siliconangle.com

A shrinking industry

The launch comes as global call-center employment sits 5.3% below its December 2023 peak. It has fallen year over year for eight straight quarters, according to an Oct. 6 report cited by TheStreet. The same article noted that Salesforce ↘ 0.87% cut its customer-service workforce from 9,000 to about 5,000 with help from AI.thestreet.com