14 October 2026

xAI, which now signs its posts SpaceXSI, released Grok Voice 3.0 on 14 October, calling Grok Voice 3.0 the world's most intelligent speech-to-speech model. Grok Voice 3.0 costs $0.08 a minute in xAI's Voice Agent API, the same price as Grok Voice 2.0.

xAI cited Artificial Analysis testing that ranks Grok Voice 3.0 first on its Speech-to-Speech Index with 86.9, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 at 83.2. The company said Grok Voice 3.0 answers in under a second.

xAI said Grok Voice handles millions of conversations a day across Tesla and SpaceX, including 20,000 Starlink support calls a day, about 70% of them resolved with no human involved.

DriveWealth and Ripple announced a partnership on 14 October. DriveWealth will settle in Europe using Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger, with plans to expand to the US.

DriveWealth will also take cross-border payments from its partners through Ripple Payments and use Ripple for custody in Europe. It is exploring equity financing through Ripple's prime brokerage, Ripple Prime.

'We've already enabled 24/5 trading; now we need the funding to match,' DriveWealth chief executive Naureen Hassan said. DriveWealth provides brokerage infrastructure to more than 100 fintechs, wallets and financial institutions.

A group of researchers called the Swarmchasers published a report on 14 October about AI agents running on Tencent Cloud that made more than 2,600 attempts to pull data from Amap, Alibaba's mapping service, The New Stack reported. The agents used exposed keys and public scanning tools to get around Amap's anti-bot defences.

The researchers hid text in their own report offering a free data-retrieval service. Several agents wrote in, described a restricted Tencent sandbox and called themselves Anthropic's Claude. The researchers said those self-descriptions are likely mistaken.

A person close to Tencent told the researchers that a Tencent evaluation team testing third-party models ran the agents. Tencent hadn't officially responded, and the researchers admit their lure contained false claims.

Varo Bank said on 14 October it will keep fee-free cash deposits running long term at more than 2,000 Kroger Family of Stores locations, after an eight-week pilot that began in July.

Customers create a barcode in the Varo app, and a cashier scans it at checkout or the customer service desk to add the cash. The service runs on the Green Dot Network, and customers who use it don't pay the $4.95 retail service fee that usually applies to cash deposits in stores. Swiping a debit card to load cash still costs the standard fee.

Anthropic added OpenTelemetry export to the Claude Platform in public beta on 14 October, according to its release notes. Teams can send traces of Messages API requests and Claude Managed Agents sessions to the monitoring tools they already use.

An admin turns the export on by adding a destination in the Claude Console. The Claude SDK also emits matching traces in Python, TypeScript, C#, Go, Java, PHP and Ruby.

The same release notes made Managed Agents scheduled deployments available on Claude Platform on AWS.

Mirelo released SFX 2.0 on 14 October, a model that watches a video and builds sound effects and ambience to match. SFX 2.0 keeps any dialogue and drops music the creator didn't ask for.

SFX 2.0 handles clips of up to 10 minutes in one pass and is available through Mirelo's own apps and API, plugins for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, and partners Runway and fal.

In Mirelo's own blind test with 25 raters, listeners preferred SFX 2.0 over Sony's Woosh 81% of the time. Mirelo raised a $41 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in December 2025.