NederlandsAI assistant Grok Bot now phones companies itself for its users
Grok Bot, the AI assistant from Elon Musk's company, has been able to phone companies in the US by itself since 3 November. It waits in the queue, holds the call and then sends a summary. Early users lowered their bills or booked appointments this way.
The AI assistant Grok Bot from Elon Musk's AI company xAI can now make phone calls on behalf of its users. Musk announced the feature on 25 October; at first only testers with a preliminary version could use it. Since 3 November, all Grok Bot users can phone companies in the United States, the tech site Teslarati reports, among others.
Grok Bot is a so-called AI agent: an assistant that does not just give answers but carries out tasks independently, even when the user is doing something else. It came out in August and runs on its own computer in the cloud.
How a call works
The user asks the assistant to phone a company and says what needs to be done. Grok Bot dials, chooses the right options in the phone menu, waits in the queue and then talks to the staff member. Meanwhile, what is being said appears in the chat. If the staff member asks something the assistant does not know, such as a PIN code, the user gets a box in the chat to type the answer. Grok Bot passes it on straight away. Afterwards, the user receives a summary of the call.
What users did with it
The best-known test comes from the American online content creator Peter Yang. His assistant spent about 25 minutes on the phone with internet provider Comcast. It turned down three more expensive offers and pointed to a cheaper offer from competitor Sonic. According to Yang, his bill went from 84 to 45 dollars a month, for a faster subscription. That saves him almost 470 dollars a year. Before agreeing, the assistant first asked Yang for permission.
Other users reported on X that after a call of 51 minutes, the assistant got a 100-dollar gift card back from Verizon, and that it booked an appointment with a paediatric orthopaedic doctor for a child with a painful foot the same morning. It does not always work: one user said a staff member would not cancel his subscription once it became clear that an AI was calling. All of these examples come from the users themselves.
Clear rules
According to the Grok Bot terms, the assistant says at the start of every call that it is a virtual assistant calling on someone's behalf. Calls may be recorded. The user remains responsible for the call. Advertising, mass calling, pretending to be someone else and calling emergency numbers are forbidden. For now, Grok Bot can only call US numbers.
The cost
Assistants like this need a lot of computing power, and a call that is mostly waiting takes a long time. On 1 November, Musk wrote on X that the costs of Grok Bot were too high compared with the income. According to Teslarati, the weekly limits for users are therefore being lowered. The company has not yet said how calling counts towards them. Grok Bot is included in X subscriptions from about 30 dollars a month. According to Teslarati, around 800,000 paying people used the assistant every week at the beginning of November.
What does this mean for the road to the singularity?
An AI assistant that picks up the phone by itself shows how AI is carrying out tasks in the real world more and more independently. Calling works with almost every company, even where there is no website or app for it. This way, an assistant can take over work that many people find annoying, such as waiting in a queue or negotiating over a bill. The next step is for such assistants to become cheaper to run, so that more people can use them more often.
What is the technological singularity? Read the explanation →
