Used Grok for the first time, in a Tesla, and for that purpose it actually made a lot of sense. It’s very well-integrated into the car’s systems and communication style while driving tends to be very tweet-esque. I think this is the niche they should lean into more (live assistant, e.g. Jarvis type stuff) and leave the more agentic niche to folks like Anthropic. Maybe even delegate more difficult or background tasks to those sorts of models. As a verbal interface I found it pretty pleasant.
I am honestly a bit disappointed it couldn't do basic things, like play X on Spotify. To be fair, I accidentally activated Grok for holding the voice command button too long (which is another UX issue - i.e. 2 voice command interfaces).
I mean, even Google Home and Alexa could handle playing a song on Spotify by me asking for it a decade ago. It's baffling that wasn't one of the first things implemented in Grok for Tesla.
The built-in assistant already does a great job of this, so whatever they do with Grok they'll want it to be better in some way. Like, "help me find songs similar to..." or "help me find that one song by that one guy with these lyrics".
Is this a serious question? In my view a live assistant differs from an agentic model in that it is a conversational interface, interconnected with live data feeds and able to exert some control over the physical environment. Can agents do some of those things? Sure. But this isn’t the primary intended application for agentic tech, which focuses on running longer tasks unattended. And yes, Jarvis could make use of background tasks himself, and I think that’s a major part of his value. But it doesn’t have to be Jarvis actually performing those tasks, just directing them. Let the agents do the agentic things, and let the more conversational models interface with the humans.
Grok in Tesla is utterly terrible, a rushed out product with a very bad UX.
As a simple example, it's the very first feature in Tesla's UI that does not come translated to the UI language set by the user but it's just available in English. Never happened before.
