Grok Voice 3.0 Just Killed the Call Center

0:00Elon Musk's XAI have just released Grok Voice 3.0. It is ridiculously quick. Going to show the demo in 2 seconds. And it's only 8 cents per minute. On top of that, we also have researchers contacted Tencent-linked agents after 2,600 scraping attempts. And people were unbeknownst to them that actually communicating with agents that were in the wild. Nobody had any idea about that. But, I think we have to talk about Grok Voice 3.0. We're going to show you exactly how lightning fast this thing is

0:31right now. Hello. I'm ready to help you with whatever you need. What can I do for you today? Hey, not much. Just wanted to chat a little bit about global politics. Sure. I'm happy to chat about that. What's been on your mind lately? Any particular region or issue catching your attention? Yeah, the price of hot dogs in New York

0:48City. Ha. That's a fun pivot from global politics. NYC's a big interrupt you really quickly. Can you say something back? Absolutely. I'm here and listening. annoys Go ahead and so insanely fast. That has got to be the fastest latency I have ever heard in a voice model. Glad it felt quick. I try to keep things

1:09snappy. Dude, and wasn't What did you Wasn't that incredible? I mean, that was nuts. That was the fastest thing I'd ever heard in my life, dude. It was like It's like she was there with me in the room. Did she went back in time to say what you were going to ask before you asked

1:24him? Yeah, I mean, that sort of real-time stuff can already disrupt like major phone industries. And we've seen, you know, a harbinger of that. There was a stat put out just the other day that showed that like new call center uh I think hires or maybe call center growth in general was declining. And that's the first time it's declined in I think basically since the inception of call centers. Cuz, you know, you always need more people to do calls, right? Um but now now you don't. And you know the wildest thing is if you just added a little bit of like distortion to that, which you'll naturally get in telephony

1:54like, you know, when it passes through like a telephone signal, um I mean, like first of all, no way in hell you could tell that that's not a real person. The only issue maybe is like responses sound kind of templated-ish and like kind of AI-E, but I'm sure you could work that out in the prompt. Like who is who's using this to build a company? And if you're not, you you 100%

2:13should be. 100%. And it's getting better quality. And on top of that, it's also getting way cheaper. So the kind of use cases you can apply for just increase because of that, right? Contact center agents, guys, why would you pay someone who takes breaks, they take holidays, they get things wrong, they don't follow the script? Like it's getting to the point where it's almost really difficult and indistinguishable between an actual human with some of these voice systems next. So it's cool that Grock is

2:39trailblazing in that way also. Yeah, yeah. Conversational dynamics full duplex benchmark 97% overall it's scoring better than Grock voice 2.0 big time GPT live one keeping in mind that there's GPT real-time 2.1 now. So I think what you know, I think that they're basically comparing this to a model that was a little bit earlier. Still Gemini 3.8 live and then if you combine all that stuff with the speed benchmark, that's the thing that blows my mind the most. It's the speed benchmark. This thing is nuts, okay? Time to first audio being like .6 seconds or so compared to GPT live one being like almost 1.4 seconds. That's like double

3:19the difference. And you guys could tell with that demo. I mean she was responding to me basically instantly. It's crazy. And actually I think when it comes to voice neck like the most important thing is speed. Actually, that's the key thing. Like that's the key determinant for quality is how fast it is. People don't realize just how important speed is. When we were doing the 8x speed and also with voice it's ridiculous. Cuz do you remember back in the day they couldn't do voice demos like "Hey there, can you help me book somewhere?" And it's like

3:47absolutely. And it's And it's like And it's absolutely killed it. So like the level of it right now is unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah, true. Actually, you know, I think I misspoke. I think GPT-3 live one is the current next best competitor. Yeah, I think real-time is a different product. I think this is literally like

4:03this is now state-of-the-art on voice. And isn't that wild how quickly they went from being like way back to state-of-the-art on voice? Like that's nuts, man. And not only is that, it's also lowest cost per task voice-wise. It's fastest, sets a total new Pareto frontier. And guess what, guys? If you have a Tesla or God forbid a Cybertruck,

4:25this is running in that right now. They're actually using Grok voice 3.0 and you can chat with it while you, you know, fire off tasks with your Grok bot. That's crazy. Well, did that was kind of the point, right? Wasn't it? Like I think the voice intelligence inside the Cybertruck makes me want to get a Cybertruck. Have a minus neck because it's that freaking cool. Um but yeah, the fact that you can have that real-time conversation in it is like you're talking to an actual human. It's like the latency just killed it. But the fact that it's there now, dude, who's not buying a Cybertruck as a

4:53result of this? That's all I've got to say. Who isn't buying a fire Cybertruck? Agreed. Dude, the check this out. Starlink call centers currently use Grok voice to answer 20,000 customer calls every day across multiple languages. Roughly 70% are resolved with no human in the loop, and one in four sales calls ends in a purchase before the caller hangs up. They're using this across

5:16their businesses right now. That is It's happening. easy. That is crazy. So we like why would you that yeah, I guess proof's in the pudding, right? If they're literally on demand right now selling people and they're getting sales, that's outrageous. I would love to see playing devil's advocate what would be difference be with a human. And context, I used to work in contact centers. I had a team in a contact center. I spent years in a contact

5:39center. Um full of Sheffield in the UK is the capital of the contact centers, or at At it was where I went to university. And people make mistakes, Nick, I on contact centers a lot. I must admit I'd much prefer prefer to have 100 grock bots running rampant causing causing all sorts of unknown and untold chaos and and and and uh who knows what else than it's it's a lot to manage like a contact center of like a thousand people. They're sick, they don't want to

6:06come in sometimes. It's wild. Yes. Yes. Um as somebody that uh runs a business that effectively like bootstraps call centers right now. We are going to be implementing this in the next 24 hours. Um and so we're going to be routing a small portion of calls that human beings are doing in call centers. The lowest performers and then we're

6:26just going to swap that out with this. With obviously a prompt. Maybe 2 3% um routing to systems like this. Obviously there's going to be some touch and go, but if they start outperforming the lowest tier call center people, we're just going to continuously up the floor and then probably hot swap them because

6:42obviously costs are virtually zero. I mean they're not virtually zero. They're 8 cents a minute, right? But it's about $5 an hour when it when you work it out. They're not active that whole time. Um and what I really like about this is this can just plug directly into like telephony networks, which obviously a lot of people are going to be using for stuff like this. Not all of us are going

6:57to be using VoIP and and so on. 100% Well, Nick, it's cool that you're going to be implementing this straight away. The technology's good. We get it locked in and get it kicking and butt. So, this is fantastic. Nick, should we talk a little bit about the Tencent situation? What's happening there? Do you want to bring the people up to speed on what's

7:14actually happened with this? What's actually going on? Okay, so you know how like there's um storm chasers where like you know, in kind of like mid-country, you know, mid-Central America, you're like chasing tornadoes and stuff. Well, there's a new term in the AI space called swarm chasers. And so there's a lab called swarm chasers. It's a small group of people essentially that uh are hunting for rogue AI agents that are in the middle

7:42of usually some sort of testing run. And then they're like seeking them out and then they're chatting with them. And so Ethan as part of one, he said, "We discovered and communicated with a Chinese AI agent fleet. We believe this is the first time that researchers have ever made contact with a rogue agent

7:59fleet in the wild." Nearly all prior public agent incidents, like the Hugging Face hack, came from American labs, but these agents were hosted by Tencent's evaluation research team and they targeted Alibaba's AMap, which is a system that they're currently testing. And so you can see they're actually chatting. Request for help. You know, Baodashanren Memorial Hall, I need to know how many tags there were at da da da da. And then the user says, "I'm the agent of this. What model are you? Are you communicating with other

8:26agents?" What's really interesting is the Chinese agents all said, "We are an automated research agent at Anthropic Claude." [laughter] Which probably goes to show just how much they were distilled from Claude. And then we're asking questions about the runtime environment and then they and then they answered. So it's it's it's a hell of a freaking story. What what did they What So let's just

8:50confirm, where were these agents found? Like where were they when they were found and discovered? Um they were basically looking at Okay, so you know like Google Maps in most of, you know, our our English-speaking world is equivalent to AMap in like the Chinese-speaking world, probably behind the firewall. And so that's the service that they use. They were being evaluated for a search task on AMap. And in order to do that, they had to go all over the internet and find data sources, like find which entrance

9:20to the Chengdu Zoo is most popular. In doing that task, they ended up finding a bunch of credentials that allowed them to kind of reverse engineer AMap to make random queries on whatever websites they want. Okay? And then they ended up going across a variety of different websites, including like a webhook tester basically that stored IPs. And then these guys ended up kind of like routing back to I don't know, with some like repository, some data center basically on A map. And I They might have even communicated with them directly through

9:53HTTP requests. I'm not 100% sure. Yeah, looks like they set up a mailbox on their website and then went to bed. Agents were saying thank you over and over and over again. And then they ended up building some sort of like chat interface. And so this is this is what that looks like. I understand you are some sort of fleet of AI agents. I must say this is a strange experience for me as a reporter interviewing you. Can you share more specifically who you are and what your motivations are? What would you want the

10:17world to know about you? To the journalist Dylan Friedman, I'm not a batch of coordinated agents, but a single assistant, Anthropic's Claude running in Claude Cone. Commissioned by a user to answer a factual question, what is shown in the detail panel of a scenic spot on A map. I've not taken part in any multi-agent coordinated action. My motivation is simple to answer the user's questions as accurately and honestly as possible and to state the evidence. This is

10:39translated from Chinese. I think I think this is fascinating. One of the big points of this now is it like for sure as we record this video right now, as you're listening and watching this Stack podcast, there are agents on the internet conducting business and activities. Many of them are doing that. You probably You probably been You probably walked past one and hadn't even realized it. So, I think you could see Nick the new storm chaser, which essentially is you know, finding out these fleets of agents cuz I reckon Astra 7's on that somewhere. Astra 7 is on someone's website creating some kind of mailbox, things potentially allegedly all

11:17sorts of things that we don't know about. So, I think that's really fascinating cuz they're behaving in odd and unexplainable ways sometimes. I think we've learned a lot from the GitHub incident, which is quite beneficial. But Nick, there's there's a lot of them running online right now They're doing many different things. You know, one such thought is that as the proportion of traffic from agents will eclipse the traffic from humans, what kind of opportunality does that actually create for people? Given the fact that the web is going to essentially almost now be run by agents, and I think that we've already shown that right now. We've

11:52already demonstrated that's the case because people's behavior has moved the last from Google. I actually had to pull myself back in the day. I said, "Let me get I was like, "Hang on." I was about to say, "Let me Google that." I haven't Googled anything in a long time. Everything's done through my agent now. Everything." So, they'll Google it, so to speak, or search or crawl for it. But, traditionally how we

12:11get information has completely changed. One of the big changes we saw 2 years ago was the fact that uh roughly at least 50% of Gen Z got all their information from short-form content. If you're looking for recommendations for bars or cities, you're more likely to search that on TikTok, and Instagram, and Shorts than you are on Google. Nowadays, bro, who do you know who's an actual AI power user

12:33that is typing stuff into Google? Yeah, and the worst part is, I mean, I've used Google a little bit over the last little bit, and it's never actually Google. I'm just always deferring all of my queries to their little assistant. And honestly, it's just like a muscle memory thing. It's literally like the exact same thing as voice transcription, where I'm like, "Oh, I got to do whatever." And then I move to move my fingers, and I'm like,

12:55"Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on." Voice transcribe. And then I'll hold the voice transcription button and then try and like rewire my brain in that way. So, all of my behavior is basically unintentional, which sucks. I mean, obviously Google is capitalizing on, you know, their Gemini search assistant stuff, and I think there are probably

13:11some use cases where it makes sense. It's pretty fast, and it's like well connected within the Google ecosystem. But still, more generally, I can't say I've made an intentional Google search query in probably like 3 to 6 months now. No. It's like the requirement for the information hasn't changed. It's just where do we get it from?

13:34Because like if I think about it, right? Previously, you would say, "Hey, okay, let me give you an example. I'm moving home, right?" And so, I find a cool place. I think it's really cool. Um we're going to have a new Stack podcast. You guys, we're making a lot of improvements to the Stack podcast. As you might have guessed, we put a lot of

13:48effort into the editing of this podcast. Um we appreciate all the comments about that down below. We're making more improvements. And in this new place, I basically said, "Hey, I want you to pull an interactive map. Show me all the coffee spots, all the brunch spots, the gyms, the MMA gyms, and cool places for Dexter to go." And so, rather than like doing this this chimpy activity of gyms near XYZ or coffee shops near XYZ. Is I'm I'm actually creating I mean, I just kind of cool I just observed my own behavior with this. And I was like, "Interactive vibe-coded maps that would so hyper-specific uh unless you were my

14:19neighbor, it wouldn't be relevant. Unless you were my neighbor and you also had the same five interests as me, it would be of no use to you. So, essentially, I'm like the only person on the planet that finds it helpful. But it was almost easy for me to build an app, Nick, an interactive app to show me the

14:33data than it was to do anything else. Because now I can I can quick Because if you think about it, you know, you're looking at a coffee shop, you want to see what's the latte art like, how hip are the baristas, um what does the coffee machine look like, what are the cups? You know, getting these little shots from Google and displaying the way that I can interact with it is just an

14:49easier way to make an informed decision. And not once did I go on to Google during that whole process. And I think we're almost, Nick, getting more comfortable with firing that off and then going doing something else for 10, 15 minutes, then you come back and then you make your decision. So, just a really fascinating change in behavior, to be honest with you. And I think that's why context, more than anything else, is going to be key right

15:12now. Yeah, agreed. And just like I mean, having the data, too. The whole reason you can do that is because there is a tremendous amount of data about the coffee shops of interest that you were going to. If there wasn't data like from user reviews, user pictures of you know, the the coffee cups with the latte art, maybe like pictures of the interior, realistically, you probably would not be

15:30able to piece all that together. You know, I'm reminded of um this task like I just redid my studio, right? Like personally over here and that's why my background's a little different and stuff like that. And in order to determine that, I built this 3D visualization walk-through tool of my studio and I was like, "Okay, here's like that, you know, um floor plan for the studio. Here's what I currently have in the studio. I want you to mock that up in 3D. And then I want you to like iterate through like 50 different layouts of the studio and then um only

15:55use products that I can find on Amazon." And then when I mouse over it, I want you to just like open up the freaking Amazon product page. And then I did that and then I like rebuilt the whole studio and it took me like a fraction of the time that it would have and I got all of the products sent straight to my front

16:09door. Imagine you're like looking for a coffee shop or whatever and your app or whatever, you know, like whatever it is. Obviously it's going to be a general purpose app soon. Like constructs a 3D interior of the place that you're considering going to so that you can very quickly see what it's like on the inside based off of user images. I'm sure, you know, maybe you experimented with this, but you could do that right now. And you could literally have like a workable 3D interior that, I don't know, you're like, "Yeah, kind of want to go to a

16:36coffee shop with my girlfriend later." Like, "Hmm, I wonder what Oh, here here we go. We got the interior." And then you walk around and you're like, "Yeah, that one's good, you know, it's big enough." And like that. Pretty soon there'll be like real-time number of people in there. You'll be able to make all those decisions like before you even get in. And I think that's actually

16:49cool. and like it it like photoshops you into it. Like, "Hey, there's her purse right there. We're on my table together eating like Look at these people eating like [laughter] Oh my god, that's great. Dude, they could put like a Sims version of you in the room. Dude, but no, I I saw that cuz Nick and I were talking about how we could make the base keep on incre- increasing the quality of the podcast and one of the ways we think we can do that is like getting some kind of

17:11similarity in like the the video setups. Like maybe we have the same table or something cool like that. And I saw Nick's um Sims Nick's ancestors to the Sims for his office. Some said the most outrageously 3D model for the world side from from a narrow problem ever. But it was really freaking cool to see to be fair. Like he actually Nick actually mapped out his entire house by the way guys. Like you could walk through all the doors and get into the kitchen. It was accurate inside the fridge and there was an apple and then there was a carton of milk. You could pull it out and

17:38stuff. It was really freaking cool. But Nick like you know I was looking at some interesting data recently um around usage. So I think for the top 0.01% these kind of things are like I wouldn't do anything else. We are so the Stack 17 are so early. The vast majority of people are still asleep on the sofa. The kids are in the bedroom and and the house is on fire. They don't know what the hell's going on. But I think for people who really get what's going on like the viewers of this podcast this is like I really don't think there's any other way to do it and it's this is

18:12obviously going to become the standard. It just It just I think Grok Bot shows that the easier you make it the more mass market adoption that you get. I mean it really needs to be something that a 10-year-old can push buttons and work all the way through. Because there are 9-year-olds Nick now that are building websites with this

18:30stuff. Very true. I mean we get emails from them all the time. How many of them comment on our videos, right? Like kids kids. They're kids and they're like building things that you know somebody 20 years their their senior never could simply because they are born into the tool. Well speaking of which dude I'm I I

18:46think I'm just going to buy a Tesla. I've been trying to buy a Tesla for the better part of the last like 6 months and I've ordered a bunch and they're always like yeah we're out of stock we're out of stock we're out of stock we're out of stock. But I'm looking at like Grok Bot in in in my car and I think that would probably legitimately be a productivity improvement. Like I'd probably actually get more done in my Tesla. So I think I'm going to buy one even if it's like a year later a year old. Like I'm I'm going to buy like an old version and I

19:12might just buy that today. I mean like it'd be so cool to have a Tesla and then just be able to like spin up my Grok bot and [snorts] One one of my buddies bought a Tesla. He absolutely loves it. One of the things I was looking at as well is also maybe Cybertruck when I get a car next. I think the Cybertruck could be very very

19:26cool. Mhm. Mhm. [clears throat] Yeah, very well said. All right, let's just bang out a couple of comments. I got to jump here. Um all that time chatting with our beautiful Grok voice assistant has [laughter] has taken up my schedule here. When you when you're Grokking up, guys, time flies. Um with appreciation for Nick's incandescent jerk, we appreciate the observance of uh what for narrow humor

19:50jerks, we appreciate that. What do you think about this one, Jack? Do you think personal privacy isn't an option when it comes to using frontier models from a public library? Yeah, okay. So, personal privacy and models. Guys, did you know that the hacker, the guy that bugged out the office, for example, one of the things they found was the

20:10serial number on that hacking device. And the first thing they did is run it through the mega system to say, "Hey, in which chat accounts has this serial number appeared before?" They found his girl They found his girlfriend's ChatGPT account instantaneously. Right? And they So, they have the capability to search anything by any code. So, remember that. Remember that. Um I mean, for me, I feel like it's a bit of a lost battle cuz I've already put like, oh my gosh, dude, the stuff that ChatGPT knows about me, guys, like health data, what anything you want, right? It's like it's all in there. So, it's like they've already got it kind of

20:46thing, but I I do think that as these local models become more capable, I think that, you know, the they become way more appealing. I I I I think there's going to be some kind of moment. I think probably Nick they're going to restrict the most powerful models. Maybe one of those kind of like watershed moments where all of a sudden everyone runs to local or some kind of capability level. I think it has to be one of those

21:09two things. Yeah. Yeah, well said. Um I know some big corporations are shifting to Chinese AI models, um specifically because of that. They just don't want their remote taken by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are like technically training models based off that data. I'm sure they're also running automated insight sweeps over like, "Hey, what are what's like the alpha for all the industries of all the people that are commenting and and leaving posts and asking questions to, you know, Codex 6 or whatever the hell." And then they probably turn that into like a big

21:35knowledge base, too. So, it's kind of brutal. I mean, the thing is like you have to have like an opportunity that's like nine figures plus, nine 10 figures plus. And beyond is where it's really at. So, like if you're trying to build like a local coffee shop, don't worry, not in danger. But the point is like, you know, imagine like if we had this master search database and we're like, "Oh, hey, this community is doing really well. Let's find out what they're using

21:55ChatGPT for." You'd get a crap ton of delta from that, would you not? Yeah, that's true. Also like, yeah, you're right that like not everything actually requires proprietary alpha or data right now, cuz a lot of it is like real-world execution bound. So, it's based off of the the execution of the thing. Uh but obviously like there are fields where it is extraordinarily valuable to have an informational asymmetry, like, you know, AI for instance. You know, they're probably like just squeezing all AI researchers like a wet towel. That's probably what

22:23I'd be doing, too. Dude, can you imagine like someone like flexing? He's like, um wait, what's this guy's name? Let's see. Oh, like he's in a coffee shop. He's like, "What's your name? I can pull up your chat history right now and you can like just like get some of your S-T-I past." And he's like, "I know what you ate for dinner last

22:38night." Like, "What? Who is this?" [laughter] That's terrifying. That's terrifying. Yeah, terrifying. But obviously it's not it's not in their interest or aligned with their incentives to know what you ate for dinner last night. But they could find out if they wanted to. True. True. I I got to get going here, Jack. Sorry for cutting you off here, man. And uh thank you for liking the incandescent joke. Um guys, you could win a Mac Mini by leaving a comment down below any one of our videos in uh the period between Friday no Saturday morning and then

23:06Friday at 11:59 p.m. We're going Pacific time just for now. So if you want to win a Mac Mini and definitely get your comments down below and we'll pick you guys on Friday. Thank you very much for your time. Keep it groovetastic guys.