Is Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) Down?

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Last editorial review: 2026-10-15

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Known issues we've tracked

GROK VOICE 3.0 -- NEW SPEECH-TO-SPEECH MODEL AT THE SAME $0.08/MIN, 2.0 MARKED DEPRECATED, AND `grok-voice-latest` ALREADY MOVED (2026-10-14, vendor-primary): xAI announced 'Grok Voice 3.0, the world's most intelligent speech-to-speech model', 'available today in the API at the same price as its predecessor'. **Price:** 'available today in the Voice Agent API at $0.08 / min ($4.80 / hr), the same price as Grok Voice 2.0. Agents using grok-voice-latest have already been switched over automatically, with no changes needed.' docs.x.ai/docs/pricing (fetched 10/15) lists 'Speech to Speech (grok-voice-3.0) $0.08 / min ($4.80 / hr) $0.004 / text input' and **'Speech to Speech (grok-voice-2.0) Deprecated'** at the same rate -- no removal date given, so pin 2.0 only knowing it is on the way out. Unlike the 8/05 repoint (a 1.6x increase, entry below), this alias move does not change the bill. **Claims:** #1 on Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Index at **86.9** ('Source: Artificial Analysis, October 13, 2026' -- a dated third-party snapshot as reported by xAI); **97% on Full Duplex Bench**; **71.6% on tau-Voice**, 'comparable with GPT-Live-1 (Astra), but at 40% lower latency'; **74% accuracy on ServiceNow's EVA-Bench**, the highest; lower cost per task than GPT-Live-1 (Astra, Medium) and GPT-Realtime-2.1 on AA's Big Bench Audio run (chart only). **Deployment:** 'millions of conversations a day' in Tesla vehicles and Grok Bot voice mode; Starlink call centres take 20,000 calls a day with ~70% resolved without a human. Leaderboard positions decay -- treat the AA rank as of 2026-10-13.
2026-10-14•xAI / SpaceXSI (x.ai/news/grok-voice-3, JSON-LD datePublished 2026-10-14) + docs.x.ai/docs/pricing (Voice API table) -- fetched 2026-10-15 via curl with browser UA
GROK VOICE TRANSCRIBE 2.0 -- TWICE THE ACCURACY AT THE SAME PRICE, ALREADY THE DEFAULT, AND 1.0 IS ON ITS WAY OUT (2026-09-18, vendor-primary): xAI released its next speech-to-text model, 'one of the most accurate transcription models available today and **twice as accurate as Grok Voice Transcribe 1.0, at the same price**'. It is built on the audio foundation model behind Grok Voice and trained 'on a unique dataset of live, noisy, multilingual audio'. **Claims, and where they come from:** on the public **Artificial Analysis leaderboard it 'ranks first for accuracy among 32 streaming models'** (third-party, but the ranking is a dated snapshot -- as of 2026-09-18); on four **internal** production sets (customer-support telephony, Grok conversations, spoken credentials such as account codes and emails, short voice commands in 19 languages) it beats 1.0 on all four and 'on telephony it leads every model we tested' -- vendor-run, no table published. The one hard number: on xAI's short-phrase set **word error rate drops from 20.6% to 6.8%**. Multilingual accuracy is 'its largest improvement': dozens of languages, automatic detection, mid-recording language switches in a single pass. **API features:** batch and streaming; word-level timestamps with confidence scores; **speaker diarization at no additional cost**; up to 8-channel multichannel; **key term biasing up to 100 terms per request**; written-form formatting of numbers, dates, currencies, phone numbers and emails; filler-word removal; smart turn detection for voice agents. **PRICING IS IDENTICAL TO 1.0:** $0.10 per hour batch, $0.20 per hour streaming -- confirmed against xAI's live model catalogue, where both models carry the same per-audio-second rate. **MIGRATION:** existing integrations 'get the accuracy improvement with no code changes'; the post says 2.0 'will soon be the default' and that **1.0 'will be deprecated in the coming weeks'** -- and by 2026-09-21 the STT docs already list **grok-voice-transcribe-2.0 as 'Default when model is omitted'** and 1.0 as 'Original model. Pin this slug to keep it.' So the default flip has effectively executed; only 1.0's removal date is open. Atlassian is named as a customer: Loom now uses Transcribe 2.0, with a workflow that pipes Loom transcripts into Cursor.
2026-09-18•SpaceXAI (x.ai/news/grok-voice-transcribe-2, JSON-LD datePublished 2026-09-18); xAI STT docs (docs.x.ai/developers/model-capabilities/audio/speech-to-text -- 2.0 'Default when model is omitted'); xAI models catalogue (docs.x.ai/docs/models, per-audio-second pricing identical for 1.0 and 2.0) -- all fetched 2026-09-21 via curl with browser UA
PRICE CORRECTION -- TEXT-TO-SPEECH IS $15.00 PER 1M CHARACTERS ON XAI'S LIVE RATE CARD, NOT $4.20 (verified 2026-09-21): while checking Transcribe 2.0 we re-read xAI's pricing page and API landing page, and both state '**Text to Speech $15.00 / 1M characters**'; the machine-readable model catalogue prices `grok-tts` at 150,000 per character in the same units that give $0.10/hr for batch STT, which also works out to $15.00 per 1M. **This page had carried $4.20 per 1M characters since the 2026-04-17 launch.** We re-fetched that launch post today: its text states the STT rates ($0.10 and $0.20 per hour) in words but presents TTS cost only as a chart titled 'Cost per million characters', so **the $4.20 figure cannot be re-verified against any vendor page** -- either xAI raised the rate at some point between April and September without an announcement we found, or the original figure was read off a chart incorrectly. We ship the number the vendor publishes today and flag the history honestly. **Consequence for the comparison:** at $15 per 1M characters Grok TTS is no longer cheaper than ElevenLabs' effective rates on most tiers, so the 'undercuts ElevenLabs on price' framing in this review's April narrative applied to STT only; the pro and con lines have been corrected. The speech-to-speech agent rate ($0.08/min, $4.80/hr, plus $0.004 per 1M text input) and both STT rates are unchanged.
2026-09-21•xAI docs pricing page (docs.x.ai/docs/pricing -- 'Text to Speech $15.00 / 1M chars'), x.ai/api ('Text to Speech $15.00 / 1M characters'), docs.x.ai/docs/models (grok-tts perCharacter 150000), and x.ai/news/grok-stt-and-tts-apis (launch post re-read: TTS price appears only in a chart) -- all fetched 2026-09-21 via curl with browser UA
THE `grok-voice-latest` REPOINT HAPPENED ON SCHEDULE 2026-08-05 -- AND IT IS A 1.6x PRICE INCREASE IF YOU DIDN'T PIN (verified against xAI's own models endpoint 2026-08-06): the alias migration announced on 7/29 executed as promised. xAI's live model catalogue now attaches **`aliases: ["grok-voice-latest"]` to `grok-voice-think-fast-2.0`** across every cluster it publishes (us-east-1, eu-west-1, us-saltlake-2), and **`grok-voice-think-fast-1.0` now carries no aliases at all**. So any integration still calling `grok-voice-latest` is on Think Fast 2.0 as of 8/05, with no code change and no deploy on your side. **THE PART XAI DID NOT PUT IN THE ANNOUNCEMENT: this alias move raised the per-audio-second rate by exactly 1.6x.** xAI's catalogue prices Think Fast 2.0's realtime audio at **1.6 times** Think Fast 1.0's (13,333,333 vs 8,333,333 in the endpoint's own units). Against the vendor-published **$0.08 per minute** headline for Think Fast 2.0, that puts Think Fast 1.0 at **$0.05 per minute** -- so unpinned callers went from roughly $3.00 to $4.80 per hour of audio overnight. The capability jump is real (AA Speech-to-Speech Quality Index 82.9% vs 75.7%, time-to-first-audio 0.70s vs 1.25s -- see the entry below), and 2.0 uses 0.4x the reasoning tokens of 1.0, so the effective cost story depends on your workload. But if you budgeted voice spend off the 1.0 rate and did not pin, **check your August bill** -- this is a silent 60% unit-price increase on a default alias. Pinning still works: `grok-voice-think-fast-1.0` remains callable, it simply is not what `latest` means any more
2026-08-05•xAI models catalogue (docs.x.ai/docs/models -- alias and per-second pricing read directly off the live endpoint payload, fetched 2026-08-06), x.ai/news/grok-voice-think-fast-2 (announcement, 2026-07-29)
NEW MODEL -- GROK VOICE THINK FAST 2.0, AND `grok-voice-latest` REPOINTS ON 2026-08-05 (2026-07-29, vendor-primary): xAI shipped '**our most capable speech-to-speech voice model**', publishing third-party benchmarks from Artificial Analysis. **AA Speech-to-Speech Quality Index 82.9%** vs 75.7% for Think Fast 1.0, ahead of GPT-Realtime-2.1 High (79.1%) and Gemini 3.1 Flash High (69.5%). Component scores: Big Bench Audio 97.2%, **Full Duplex Bench 95.1%** (up from 77.8%, essentially closing the gap to GPT-Realtime-2.1's 95.7%), tau-voice Bench **56.5%** (vs 45.7% GPT-Realtime-2.1), and **time to first audio 0.70s** vs 1.25s for 1.0 and 2.98s for Gemini 3.1 Flash. Transcription: xAI claims a **1.5-2.0x accuracy improvement over Deepgram Nova 3 and ElevenLabs Scribe v2** across thousands of short phrases in 24 languages, widening to **~10x in noisy settings**. Architecture note worth understanding: these models **reason while speaking** -- 'reasoning in parallel with speech makes the model substantially smarter than other speech-to-speech models with no impact on latency' -- and 2.0 uses **0.4x the reasoning tokens** of 1.0, so tool calls typically fire before the agent finishes its first sentence. **PRICING: $0.08 per minute of audio.** **ACTION REQUIRED FOR API USERS: on August 5, 2026 the `grok-voice-latest` alias moves from `grok-voice-think-fast-1.0` to `grok-voice-think-fast-2.0`.** No action is needed to upgrade; to stay on 1.0 you must **pin `grok-voice-think-fast-1.0` before then**. xAI says the upgrade needs no prompt edits, and cites a Starlink support-line A/B test showing higher sales conversion and support containment. BRANDING NOTE: the vendor page is titled under **SpaceXAI** while the footer still reads (c) 2026 X.AI LLC -- the brand has shifted, the legal entity name has not
2026-07-29•xAI/SpaceXAI (x.ai/news/grok-voice-think-fast-2, fetched 2026-08-03 via curl -- x.ai 403s WebFetch)
EXPANSION (2026-07-06): xAI released **21 new flagship TTS voices** (Lumen, Castor, Naksh, Atlas, Carina, Zagan, Helix, Orion, Luna, and more), bringing the lineup to 26 -- each cast for a specific job (support, characters, commentary, advertising, education) and natively multilingual across Grok Voice's 25+ languages. The original five (Ara, Eve, Leo, Rex, Sal) were retrained for more natural pacing/phrasing/emphasis. All are available in the realtime Voice Agent API, the Text-to-Speech API, and a **new no-code Grok Voice Agent Builder** in the xAI console. **Custom voice cloning from ~1 minute of audio is now exposed** (closes a prior gap vs ElevenLabs). Speech tags ([pause], <whisper>, <emphasis>, <soft>) control delivery
2026-07-06•xAI (x.ai/news/new-flagship-voices)

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

GPT-Live (ChatGPT Voice)

8.6

**GPT-Live-1.1 and a smaller GPT-Live-1.1 Quip began rolling out in ChatGPT Voice on 2026-10-15, with more natural accents, shorter spoken cues while it searches, and new voices for French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Mexican Spanish plus an English voice called Bubbie.** OpenAI's full-duplex voice models (launched in ChatGPT 2026-07-08) -- listens and speaks at the same time, backchannels naturally, and delegates hard questions to a backend model while keeping the conversation going. **GPT-Live-1 reached the API on 2026-09-10 at $0.05 per minute** for the voice layer, with telephony support, keyword biasing, delegation to any backend model (GPT-6 Astra, Luna, or a third-party model) and a wider voice set. In ChatGPT: GPT-Live-1 for paid tiers, GPT-Live-1 mini for Free. **Five days after the API launch, Google priced Gemini 3.8 Live at $0.005/min audio in and $0.018/min audio out (2026-09-15)** -- a fraction of GPT-Live-1's $0.05/min voice layer, though each stack bills backend or text tokens on top

A

ElevenLabs

8.5

**Instant Soundtracks (2026-10-15) scores any uploaded video with original music and timed sound effects in ElevenCreative, ElevenMusic and the API, with effects on separate layers and the option to use the clip's existing audio as a style reference.** **ElevenAgents gained two new tools in the week of 2026-10-06: Architect (alpha, 10/06), a built-in expert that diagnoses agent failures from transcripts and drafts tested fixes, and synthetic voice detection (10/09), which flags AI callers in the first seconds of a call -- enterprise-only for now. ElevenCreative added Brand Kit (10/09).** **Two days after the v4 launch, ElevenLabs closed a $300M employee tender at a $22B valuation (2026-09-30), double its February Series D, with enterprise now 55% of revenue -- and the pricing page is running v4 launch promos (extra v4 credits on Creator plans and above, see the Oct 2 note).** **Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo launched 2026-09-28 -- a fourth-generation voice model on an entirely new architecture**, ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis' Provider Voice Arena and preferred by ~75% of listeners in blind head-to-head tests against Cartesia Sonic 3.6, Inworld TTS-2 and Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS; v4 Turbo answers with a ~100ms median inference latency (~150ms to first speech over WebSocket) and is co-optimized with ElevenAgents. Both cover 90+ languages, follow inline audio tags like [laughs] or [phone buzzing] more accurately, clone voices with better speaker similarity, and are live now in ElevenAgents, ElevenCreative and the API (Text to Dialogue). Eleven v3 becomes the previous generation. The 2026-09-10 Universal Music Group licensing deal and CLI v1 (8/24) still stand.

A

Descript

8.5

Edit audio and video by editing text -- the 'Google Docs of media editing' actually lives up to the hype

A

Cohere Transcribe

8.0

Cohere's first audio model -- launched 2026-03-26 under Apache 2.0, 2B parameters, #1 on Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard (5.42 avg WER), 14 enterprise-critical languages. Free API with rate limits; Model Vault for production

B

Microsoft MAI-Voice-2

7.3

Microsoft's in-house expressive TTS line. **MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash launched 2026-10-01: 23 languages and 26 locales with one voice that keeps the same speaker and a native accent across languages, voice cloning from a few seconds of reference audio with consent guardrails, priced at $22 per 1M characters for 2.1 and $15 per 1M characters for Flash, which generates 45 seconds of audio at 150 ms end-to-end latency and is pitched at voice agents alongside MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming.** These supersede **MAI-Voice-2 (Build, 2026-06-02)**: 15 languages, emotion tags, zero-shot cloning from a 5-60 s clip, preferred over MAI-Voice-1 72% of the time. Microsoft also shipped a MAI-Voice-2-Flash and MAI-Image-2.5-Pro in July that this page had not recorded -- see the Oct 2 note.

About Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)

Tier A (8.1/10). **Grok Voice 3.0, xAI's new speech-to-speech model, shipped 2026-10-14 at the same $0.08 per minute as 2.0, which xAI's rate card now flags as on its way out; grok-voice-latest switched over automatically, and xAI cites a #1 score of 86.9 on Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Index.** xAI's standalone voice APIs. **Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 shipped 2026-09-18** -- xAI calls it twice as accurate as 1.0 at the same $0.10/hr batch and $0.20/hr streaming, ranks it first for accuracy among 32 streaming models on Artificial Analysis, and has already made it the default STT model; **1.0 is being retired in the coming weeks, so pin grok-voice-transcribe-1.0 if you need it**. **PRICE CORRECTION: text-to-speech is $15.00 per 1M characters on xAI's live rate card (verified 2026-09-21), not the $4.20 this page carried since April.** Speech-to-speech agent $0.08/min, 26 flagship voices, ~1-minute voice cloning, no-code Voice Agent Builder

Read the full Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)review →