Is Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) down right now?

We do not run live uptime probes. To verify Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)'s current status, check the vendor's official status page, DownDetector, or the vendor's X feed. Links are on this page.

What should I use if Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) is down?

The top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives to Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) are ElevenLabs, Descript, Cohere Transcribe. Full list and tier rankings are on this page.

Is Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of x.ai plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-04-18

How to check right now

Step 1 -- Load the site

Open x.ai→

The simplest check. If it loads and you can log in, the tool is up for you.

Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports

DownDetector: Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)→

User-reported outages aggregated across regions. Good signal for partial or regional outages.

Step 3 -- Live social

Search X for “Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)down” →

Live tweets from other users. Fastest signal for a fresh outage -- often beats status pages by 10-20 minutes.

Step 4 -- Official status page

Find Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)'s status page →

Most vendors publish a status page at status.[domain] or on Statuspage.io. Google-search to find the current URL.

Known issues we've tracked

Launched 2026-04-17 -- expect first-week rate-limit surprises and occasional multilingual hiccups in the streaming path. xAI's console rate limits are documented but may be adjusted during the shakedown period

2026-04•xAI STT/TTS announcement

The xAI-to-SpaceX acquisition (2026-02-02) means billing, compliance, and procurement flow through SpaceX. For US-regulated customers (healthcare, finance, defense) the vendor-approval pathway is new and may take longer than with a standalone AI vendor

2026-02•xAI announcement, x.ai/news/xai-joins-spacex

Speech tag control is powerful but underdocumented at launch -- expect trial-and-error to dial in the right [laugh]/[whisper]/<pause> mix for conversational TTS

2026-04•xAI STT/TTS docs, BuildFastWithAI reviews

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.

ElevenLabs

8.5

Best-in-class AI voice generation -- now includes 11.ai (MCP-based voice assistant), Eleven v3 expressive speech, and IBM watsonx partnership. $500M raise at $11B valuation (Feb 2026)

Descript

8.5

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

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

Microsoft MAI-Voice-1

7.3

Microsoft's first in-house expressive TTS model -- launched 2026-04-02 on Azure Foundry. Generates 60s of audio in ~1s on a single GPU. Custom voice cloning from a few seconds of input. Powers Copilot, Bing, PowerPoint, and Azure Speech

Murf AI

7.0

Text-to-speech that actually sounds like a real person read your script -- not a robot trying its best

About Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)

Tier A (8.1/10). xAI's standalone voice APIs -- launched 2026-04-17. Built on the stack that powers Grok Voice, Tesla vehicles, and Starlink customer support. $0.10/hr STT batch, $4.20 per 1M characters TTS, 25+ languages, word-level timestamps + speaker diarization

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