Grok Bot 0.70.2: Standalone Inboxes and Unlinked X Search

James Turner

Last episode we covered releases 0.64.0 through 0.68.1: slide deck generation, Bot colored chats, and drafting outgoing email through your personal Gmail and Outlook accounts. Today is the next step. Grok Bot 0.70.2 hit the official changelog on October 11, and it rolls up 0.69.0, 0.69.1, 0.70.0, and 0.70.1 too. Quick note first: this show is brought to you by Jellypod AI.

James Turner

Here's the headline. Last time, your bot borrowed your inbox. Now it can have its own. The official notes say bots can claim their own email address and receive mail there, and email they send from it waits for your approval on a draft card. That's the whole point. A bot can get mail without ever touching your personal credentials, and nothing goes out until you tap approve.

James Turner

Now, a detail that matters. Eric Zakariasson posted about the rollout on X on October 13, with the addresses at mail.grokbot.com. Then he followed up to correct the impression people had: it's one email address per account, for now, shared by all your bots. So don't plan on a separate inbox for every bot yet. My take, and this is interpretation, not from the notes: a shared address is still a clean place to point vendor emails or notifications, so you can read what arrives and decide what happens next. And one commenter on that thread, Hyrum, wrote that a tool called Dot once emailed his team without asking, and that drafts you can review are a much better default. That's exactly the design here.

James Turner

Second big one. Bots can search X and read posts and profiles without you connecting an X account. In the last episode's world, a bot that wanted to look at X needed your login. Now it doesn't. If you've been holding off on research tasks because you didn't want to link your account, that barrier's gone. Try asking a bot to read a public profile and summarize what that account has been posting.

James Turner

Third, apps in the chat. Connectors that come with an app, such as Figma, Notion, and Canva, can show it as an interactive card right in the conversation. So instead of a bot telling you it updated something, you see the app itself, in the thread.

James Turner

A few more additions worth knowing. Bots can pay with X Money or Stripe Link. Bots can find a Bot template that fits what you describe and link it in the chat. Adding Glean asks for your Glean MCP URL, then connects after you sign in to Glean in your browser. QuickBooks Online is available to connect. Bots can save a web page as a PDF from their browser, and send audio files such as MP3, M4A, and WAV.

James Turner

And some interface polish. Press Cmd+F or Ctrl+F on an open page to search it. You can rename a page from its title, and the new name shows everywhere. Shared pages now have a title bar with Download, which saves a PDF, plus Try Grok Bot for visitors and Share for the owner. The full screen video player has a speed menu, and voice calls offer 0.5x speed. On Mac, View Unread in the View menu shows only Bots with unread messages.

James Turner

Now the part I'd pay the most attention to, because bots can now email, pay, and post. The notes say that before an action it can't undo, such as sending, posting, buying, or deleting, a Bot checks your own messages for approval. So it looks back at what you actually said. Also, after a bank or brokerage connector returns data, the Bot asks before sharing it anywhere else. If you connect financial accounts, that's the guardrail you want. And Bots now acknowledge your message before they start longer work, so you know it heard you.

James Turner

Computer controls changed too. The full screen computer view opens in Watching until you press Take control, so you won't accidentally type into your bot's session. When a Bot's computer is asleep, the Computer tab shows a Wake button that wakes it in place. Settings now separate Your computer from the Bot's computer. And switching chats or focusing the window no longer wakes a sleeping computer.

James Turner

On reliability, there's a lot. Connector calls fail less often: Bots fix wrongly shaped arguments and accept Notion links and Slack channel names before sending. When a connector rate limits your account, Bots wait for the retry delay instead of calling it in a loop. Slack, Gmail, and Outlook drafts retry through temporary rate limits and tell you if they still couldn't send. Gmail drafts use your default send as address and add your own signature, not one quoted from someone else. If the window keeps crashing, Grok Bot offers to reload it or quit. And when a model isn't available in your region, the turn stops and explains why, and Bots fall back to Grok.

James Turner

One honest caution. Around this rollout, a user on the Cursor forum reported that on macOS, with 0.70.2, every message failed with Bot failed to respond, and creating a new bot failed too, even though the computer preview still opened. That user had already tried Update and Reset, and the issue persisted. When I looked at that thread, there was an incident banner saying they were investigating a service degradation affecting Grok Bot and preventing some users from reaching their computers. So if you hit that error, check the status first. Resetting didn't fix it for that reporter, so I wouldn't treat it as a first move.

James Turner

How to use all this. Claim your bot's email address and let it receive mail, then read its draft cards before anything goes out. Point a bot at X for research with no account linked. And if you connect money tools, lean on those new approval checks. That's 0.70.2. Brought to you by Jellypod AI. See you next time.