xAI AI Updates: April 24, 2026

1. xAI Ships Standalone Grok Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech APIs

xAI. xAI unbundled the audio stack that has been powering Grok Voice, Tesla vehicles, and Starlink customer support into two standalone APIs: Grok Speech to Text and Grok Text to Speech. The STT API supports both batch (REST) and streaming (WebSocket) transcription across 25+ languages, with word-level timestamps, speaker diarization, and multichannel support. Pricing is $0.10 per hour for batch and $0.20 per hour for streaming — meaningfully cheaper than Deepgram’s Nova or OpenAI Whisper API at equivalent quality tiers. xAI explicitly targets entity recognition and business use cases like medical, legal, and financial transcription. Source