# The state of AI voice assistants is bad but there's a clear winner > Source: > Published: 2026-05-26 09:53:00+00:00 # The state of AI voice assistants is bad but there's a clear winner * * I like the UX of speaking to voice assistants and getting stuff done. Usually it involves something not so trivial and I do expect intelligence from the assistant. But the current state of AI voice assistants is bad! Either they are stupidly slow and unusable or quick but stupid. BUT. There's a clear winner. And the winner is Grok - I'm not going to hide it from the rest of the blog post. I'm assessing across these dimensions - intelligence - speed - voice reliability and accuracy - can I interrupt and does it filter out noise well - not that important to me but the voice intonations and tone - is it human like or robot like? I only care about English for now so I'm ignoring multi lingual support. ## What I tested ### ChatGPT voice This dude is close to useless. The IQ is very low because the underlying model is GPT 4o-mini - a 2 year old model that a local model today can beat easily. Not only is this model bad, it is also smug and wastes time with nonsensical filler words. I hate it the most. It does have some fancy bidirectional tech going on but it still easily gets distracted with noice. Also worth mentioning that this one can do accents kind of well but works as a gimmick at best. For what it's worth, I tried the "non advanced" voice mode which uses GPT 5 family - it is somewhat better and doesn't have those gimmicks but still unreliable and catches noise easily. ### Claude I tried Claude voice mode - it is fast but also still stupid. It uses Haiku internally.. I wish it did use a stronger model but it doesn't. Haiku is still better than 4o-mini - I would put it at GPT 5 nano level. Good for simple conversations but nothing more. I would put Claude voice as a very basic improvement over GPT voice mode. ### Grok Voice Grok Voice mode is by far the best voice assistant out there. I don't know how they manage it but it gets most things right. The intelligence is good enough and the speed is surprisingly high. I can have somewhat long conversations and it holds through and doesn't show its stupidity easily. I like that it can do searches and think a bit heavily if needed. The best part of Grok Voice is that it is genuinely reliable and is one of the better ones at filtering noise. I would put the intelligence at around GPT 5 mini level - not great but definitely good enough for now.