X announced a new option that will enable users to listen to long-form articles posted to the app, powered by the voice of xAI’s Grok artificial intelligence chatbot.
X’s long-form articles will now be displayed with a “Listen” button when they appear in-stream, which will allow users to activate an audio translation of the content.
Users will be able to listen to the audio as they scroll in X, or even when switching to other apps, via background play.
It could be a handy option for those looking to consume longer posts in the app, and it will also give long-form content creators more opportunities to connect with readers (or listeners, as the case may be), as well as increase their following.
This, combined with X’s updated creator subscription tools, is part of X’s broader push to win over creators and get more exclusive content flowing through the app.
X is after long-form content in particular, because more in-depth, researched posts will help to better inform its xAI projects, which utilize the data posted to X to power their outputs.
The primary xAI product right now is Grok, and that tool is built on language understanding, with its main selling point being up-to-the-minute insights on any topic, based on X discussion.
Grok can provide info on a given topic, but longer, more researched pieces will give it additional context to draw from, improving its answers. With X’s long-form posts also benefiting from human endorsement, via X’s like and share options, that’s a potentially powerful learning vector for its AI tools, assuming X can get more people posting longer posts in the app.
And X apparently has been succeeding on this front.
In an X post on March 6, X’s head of product Nikita Bier said that X Articles have grown 18x over the last three months.
Of course, X has massaged these figures somewhat by offering a $1 million prize for the best-performing X Article posted in January. But even so, X is working to improve the incentives to keep people posting longer content to the app in order to keep those original, valuable insights flowing through its circuits.
Audio translations for long-form content is another element in this, and it could provide another way for creators to expand their reach in the app.
