SpaceXSI, the Grok developer previously known as xAI, released Grok Voice 3.0 on 14 October as the new default model behind its Voice Agent API. It charges $0.08 a minute, the same rate as Grok Voice 2.0 (SpaceXSI). For companies running AI agents on support lines, that is a higher-scoring model at an unchanged per-minute price. The week's other two developments turned on where models run and on what hardware: an open Arabic model family from Abu Dhabi, and Amazon's reported talks to buy a company whose software moves AI workloads between chips.
Grok Voice 3.0 holds the price on phone agents
Grok Voice 3.0 is a speech-to-speech model: it takes spoken audio in and answers in speech. SpaceXSI pitches it at customer support and says it already handles millions of conversations a day in Tesla vehicles (SpaceXSI). Beyond the per-minute rate, the API documentation lists a $0.004 charge per billable text input message, and sessions that use the default voice-activity detection are billed for their full duration (TechRepublic).
The benchmark picture is mixed. On Artificial Analysis's Speech-to-Speech Index, Grok Voice 3.0 scored 86.9, up from 81.3 for Grok Voice 2.0 and ahead of OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 at 83.2 (SpaceXSI). On τ-Voice, the index component built around support calls with accents, background noise and interruptions, it scored 71.6% against 74.5% for GPT-Live-1. Artificial Analysis measured its average time to first audio at 0.81 seconds: faster than GPT-Live-1 at 1.34 seconds, but slower than the 0.70 seconds Grok Voice 2.0 recorded (TechRepublic).
The headline deployment claim is the company's own. SpaceXSI says Starlink's call centres use Grok Voice to answer about 20,000 calls a day across several languages and resolve roughly 70% with no human involved (SpaceXSI). The announcement does not say whether those figures apply to version 3.0 alone (TechRepublic), and it gives no repeat-contact window, satisfaction score or treatment of abandoned calls, so "resolved" is undefined (The Neuron).
Some customers got the upgrade without changing anything. Agents pointed at the grok-voice-latest alias were switched to the new model automatically (SpaceXSI). TechRepublic advises teams on that alias to rerun representative support calls and check tool use, escalation behaviour and response timing (TechRepublic).
Jais 3 puts open Arabic models on Hugging Face
On 15 October, the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Inception42, a G42 company, released Jais 3: six open language models from 900 million to 375 billion parameters, plus Jais Speech, a speech recognition model for Arabic and its dialects (Gulf News). All are built on K2 Horizon, the open foundation model fleet IFM released in September (Middle East AI News).
The developers trained the models on Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, from Emirati and Gulf to North African Arabic. Jais Speech covers dialects spoken across 19 Arab countries and follows speakers who switch into English or French mid-sentence, keeping those words in their original script (Gulf News).
The performance claims are self-reported. IFM and Inception42 evaluated the models on 24 Arabic benchmarks and are publishing that benchmark set, but the scores come from their own evaluations (Middle East AI News).
The practical change is control over deployment. The weights are on Hugging Face with vLLM and SGLang support, and government and enterprise users can adapt the models and choose where to run them (Gulf News). For an organisation that needs Arabic-language AI on its own infrastructure, the size range matters as much as the scores: the developers say the smallest model can run on a phone.
Amazon is reported to be in talks to buy Decart
The Wall Street Journal reported on 11 October that Amazon is in talks to buy Decart for about $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. The paper said a deal could come soon if the talks do not fall apart and no other buyer steps in (The Next Web). No deal had been announced by 19 October.
Decart builds Lucy, a model that changes live video as it plays, and Oasis, which creates interactive worlds for robots and other physical AI. It also sells DOS, a software layer that the Journal said makes it easier for developers to move between AI chips (The Next Web). Decart says DOS runs across Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium (The Next Web). AWS gave Decart early access to Trainium last year, and Decart's video model ran live on Trainium3 at re:Invent in December 2025 (The Next Web).
The reported price is a large step up. In May, Decart raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures that valued it at nearly $4 billion, with Nvidia joining as an investor. Anthropic was in talks to buy the company for about $6 billion in shares in August, then walked away in September after due diligence (The Next Web).
If a deal closes, Amazon would own software built to move AI workloads across rival chip families, including onto its own Trainium. It is not yet clear whether Decart would keep supporting Nvidia and Google hardware under Amazon ownership.
What to watch
Amazon reports third-quarter results on 29 October (Amazon), its next scheduled chance to address Decart or Trainium demand. For Grok Voice 3.0 and Jais 3, the useful evidence will come from outside testing: resolution rates on support lines other than Starlink's, and third-party runs of the 24 Arabic benchmarks.
Sources
- SpaceXSI. "Introducing Grok Voice 3.0." 14 October 2026. https://x.ai/news/grok-voice-3
- TechRepublic. "SpaceXSI Launches Grok Voice 3.0 for AI Customer Support." 15 October 2026. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-spacexsi-grok-voice-3-ai-customer-support/
- The Neuron. "Grok Voice Says It Resolves 70% of Starlink Calls. What Counts as Resolved?" 15 October 2026. https://www.theneuron.ai/news/grok-voice-starlink-call-resolution/
- Gulf News. "UAE launches Jais 3, Arabic-native AI for speech, writing and agents." 15 October 2026. https://gulfnews.com/uae/uae-launches-jais-3-arabic-native-ai-for-speech-writing-and-agents-1.500711935
- Middle East AI News. "MBZUAI, Inception42 launch Jais 3 Arabic AI models." 15 October 2026. https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/mbzuai-inception42-launch-jais-3
- The Next Web. "Amazon in talks to buy Decart for about $7bn, WSJ reports." 13 October 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-decart-7bn-acquisition-talks-wsj
- The Next Web. "Decart raises $300M to put a real-time world model in front of Amazon's chips." 18 May 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/decart-300-million-radical-ventures-world-models
- Amazon. "Amazon will share its Q3 2026 earnings on October 29." 15 October 2026. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-earnings-q3-2026-report