AI agents can now make your phone calls
PLUS: Which free AI tool should you actually use?
Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to our 4,718 new readers. Got a phone call you’ve been putting off? Your AI agent might be ready to handle it for you, from the long hold times to the awkward small talk with whoever picks up.
SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot just got the ability to hop on the phone for its paid users, and with rival agents moving in the same direction, sitting on hold (for humans) might soon be a thing of the past.
SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot starts making phone calls
Nate’s Notebook: Make AI sketch before it builds
Which free AI tool should you actually use?
Midterm voters turn on data centers, AI
📞 SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot starts making phone calls
The Rundown: SpaceXSI just rolled out phone calls in Grok Bot, the company’s AI agent platform, which can now sit on hold, book appointments, and negotiate bills on U.S. numbers — with users legally responsible for every call the bot makes.
If a rep asks something the bot can’t answer, users get a message mid-call and type a reply for it to pass along, all while following a live transcript.
SpaceXSI’s terms make users the “caller of record,” “solely responsible” for calls and for following phone laws, with bots disclosing they’re a “virtual assistant.”
The calls appear to run directly inside the platform via a temporary number, with early examples including a Comcast bill negotiation and a pizza order .
Grok Bot is available for paid users, and Elon Musk answered complaints about usage limits by calling the platform’s cost “unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
Why it matters: AI labs keep pitching agents as a way to take annoying life tasks off people’s plates, and for many, phone calls sit near the top of that list. With Grok Voice already answering 20,000 Starlink calls a day by SpaceXSI’s own count, the phone could soon go the way of the agentic internet — bots talking with other bots.
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🗺️ Nate’s Notebook: Make AI sketch before it builds
The Rundown: Each week, Rundown AI educator Nate Grahek breaks down what he’s seeing while teaching real teams to use AI.
Nate: TED grew on two ideas. Make the world’s best and brightest distill their biggest idea into 18 minutes or less. Then help them with the visuals, because communicating complicated ideas with strong visuals takes a separate level of genius altogether. Nancy Duarte’s design team helped speakers rework their slides.
If you’re on a $20 AI plan, you’ve probably had a few aha moments and started running out of credits. You also have an entire graphic design department sitting in that chat. Claude’s custom visuals and ChatGPT’s new Intelligent UI can drop a chart, table, or flow diagram right into the reply.
Every session is finite, expiring intelligence. The question is where to thrash. Most people thrash way too late, trying to make huge swinging changes to a deck or website that’s already built. They burn their tokens, run out of credits, and still end up frustrated. You can’t change where the Mississippi River exits in Louisiana; you’ve got to change the trickle up top.
So before anything gets built, I tell it: don’t start yet. This is where we’re eventually going, but conserve your energy until we agree on the path. Never give me more than a paragraph or two. Ask me smart multiple-choice questions, or better yet, sketch it right in the chat, so you can cut big chunks of work you’ll never have to do.
🆓 Which free AI tool should you actually use?
The Rundown: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity all have free plans. But they offer different tools and limits. In this guide, you’ll run the same tasks in each one, check the results, and build a small AI toolkit without paying for the six.
Open the six services and check that each account is on its free plan. Use personal accounts and keep private work out of the test
Paste the same fictional Repair Café brief into each assistant (all resources in the full guide ). Check the event time, staffing, budget, and missing details
Ask each tool the same question about Shenandoah National Park. Open the official National Park Service source and check the leash rule and trail restrictions
Upload the same small budget CSV wherever the free tier allows it. If uploads are unavailable, paste the data and record that limit separately
Score each result for accuracy, source quality, file handling, and usefulness. Choose a main assistant, a research tool, and a backup based on results
Pro tip: A free plan can be generous for chat but tight on uploads, image creation, or research. Check the limit that applies to the task you actually do.
🤖 Build scalable autonomous AI agents
The Rundown: The new Startup guide to AI agents is a technical, code-first blueprint designed to help developers build, evaluate, and deploy robust multi-agent systems on Google Cloud using the Agent Development Kit (ADK).
Inside the guide, you’ll discover how to:
Shift from prompt to context engineering
Optimize token costs across model tiers
Implement rigorous AgentOps for production reliability
⛔️ Midterm voters turn on data centers, AI
Image source: datacentersontheballot.com
The Rundown: Voters in U.S. midterms backed limits on data centers almost everywhere those measures appeared on local ballots and handed Congress to Democrats, promising tougher oversight of Silicon Valley, with a majority also telling NBC they expect AI to do more harm than good.
Data center opponents have taken 38 of 39 fully counted local measures, according to election trackers, with only Harwood, N.D., voting the other way.
In NBC’s exit poll , 76% of voters would oppose a data center going up in their own community, and 57% expect AI to hurt society more than help.
Goldman Sachs reportedly sees 45% of planned U.S. data center capacity at risk of temporary freezes, but figures the political heat will cool over time.
Elon Musk, the biggest midterm donor at $446M backing Republicans, posted that data centers in space look “pretty appealing right now,” following the results.
Why it matters: The public has heavily rebuked AI and the data center buildout in the midterms. With AI infrastructure hubs like Texas flipping blue and Democrats about to run the hearings on AI regulation, the ground under the entire industry just shifted — and the days of a hands-off federal approach to U.S. AI labs are likely coming to an end.
▸ Keith built an AI archive of handwritten 1940s family letters
Today’s workflow comes from reader Keith Weinberger :
“I built a family archive website to host handwritten letters and photos from a relative’s 1942/43 stint in basic training. I built everything through prompts, and it could help anyone with scanned family papers who wants them searchable and open to AI chat.
I designed the basic website in Google AI Studio. I migrated the project to Replit for the build-out and hosting. I used Firebase for PDF and photo storage, and a Firebase database for users and data indexing.
I built a PDF upload workflow that extracts text from the handwritten letters. I chunk the PDFs for faster retrieval, since the files are large. The workflow creates a search index and a vector database for AI chat. I created server APIs to retrieve data and content, which avoids CORS issues. The result is a site where the letters and photos can be searched and queried through AI chat.”
See the workflow on our Community Workflow Hub →
How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured in the newsletter.
🛠️ Trending AI Tools
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📞 Grok Bot - SpaceXSI’s AI agent, now able to make phone calls for users
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🌝 Kimi K3.1 Pro - Moonshot AI’s powerful open-weight model
📰 Everything else in AI today
Uncharted: A blueprint for secure AI agents on Nov. 18 — learn the AI security strategies WestJet, SIG and TELUS Digital are putting into practice. Register now .*
AI detection startup Pangram launched Image 1.0, a model for spotting AI images and video that also works through its Chrome extension.
AI chip design startup Ricursive released Ripple-65B Preview, an open model it says cost $32M to build and tops U.S. open models on a coding agent test.
OpenAI is acquiring Pierre, the startup behind the code review tools inside Codex, and plans to add its Code Storage service to the platform as well.
AI coding startup Conductor is joining Meta, with Conductor’s platform helping developers manage multiple AI agents at the same time.
🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events
Read our last AI newsletter: Apple cracks the door open to Siri AI
Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple can’t build enough iPhone Duos
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meta builds its first humanoid robot
Today’s AI tool guide: Which free AI tool should you actually use?
RSVP to next workshop on Nov. 11 with Nate: Use Claude to its full potential
That's it for today!
Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown
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