Grok Bot took a clear step from watching X on your behalf to talking on it for you on Tuesday, October 20. In a five-minute "What's new in Grok Bot" video posted on X that morning, Matt Palmer, who works on Cursor and Grok Bot at SpaceXSI, walked through 12 changes, led by three that put the Bot directly inside X conversations and on Android phones.
The headline change is in X Chat. "Bot can now read your X chat DMs and respond," Palmer said in the video, adding that the feature had been "asked for like a million times." He said limits are in place so "you can't spam people." Elon Musk had already been pointing users toward the connection, writing on October 16 that people should ask Grok Bot to connect to their X DMs and calling it the "best way to use it." One important detail was left open: Palmer did not say whether a Bot needs its owner's approval before each reply goes out.
Tagging works anywhere on the platform, too. Users can drop @bot into any X thread and it will "do whatever you ask it to," Palmer said, because the Bot knows which X username is linked to the account. The X plugin has to be installed and configured first. His examples included having the Bot save posts and asking it to explain something just seen on the timeline. On Tuesday morning the @bot account was already answering tagged requests by replying that it was sending them over to that person's Grok Bot, while people without an account received a sign-up link.
On Android, Grok Bot can now be chosen as the phone's default digital assistant. Palmer's video shows it listed next to Google in Android's "Default digital assistant app" settings, along with the standard system warning that the assistant will be able to read information about the apps in use, including what is on the screen. The option fills the gap left a day earlier, when Grok Bot gained one-press access through the iPhone's Action Button and SpaceXSI had not said whether anything similar was coming to Android.
Voice calls also gained a short memory. A Bot now keeps the previous call and its full transcript if the user calls back, although that memory lasts only 30 minutes, which Palmer described as "sort of short-lived."
The rest of the list is everyday polish. Edits to a message a Bot drafted for Slack or Gmail are now highlighted, notifications are collapsed to the device in active use, team users can invite teammates and set access lists, the mobile app has a pill that jumps to unread messages, and email aliases effectively give a Bot unlimited addresses.
The DM move marks a real change of role. When Grok Bot gained built-in X search on October 7, replies under that announcement said it did not send direct messages or cold-message people on X, and that anything it drafted in a user's voice would be left for review. Reading and answering DMs moves the Bot from monitoring the platform to participating in conversations there, which is exactly why the unanswered approval question matters for anyone thinking of turning it on.