How to use Grokbot: your first hour, done properly

Step 1 — pick the right door

There are three ways in, and they behave differently:

• Inside X. Fastest for reacting to something you're already looking at — summarise a thread, fact-check a claim, explain who a person is. Short-form by design.
• grok.com. The full assistant. Longer answers, file uploads, image and video generation, connectors. This is where you do real work.
• The apps. Same as the site, plus voice mode, which is better than most people expect for thinking out loud on a walk.

If you signed up through X and only ever use the in-feed version, you have not actually met the product.

Step 2 — start with something time-sensitive

Every assistant can summarise a PDF. Grokbot's genuine, hard-to-copy advantage is that it knows what happened this morning — live web and X search are core to it rather than bolted on. So make your first question one that would embarrass a model with a training cutoff:

• "What's the actual state of the argument about X today, and who's on each side?"
• "Summarise what's happened with [company] this week and what changed."
• "Is this claim I just read holding up? Show me who's disputing it."

Step 3 — turn on the parts people miss

• Voice mode. Free tier included. The most underrated feature in the whole product.
• Connectors. This is how Grok reaches outside itself — your calendar, your documents, your own memory. If you only change one setting, change this one.
• Image and video generation. On paid plans, this quietly replaces a separate subscription for a lot of people.

The three mistakes new users make

1. Treating it like Google. Three-word queries get three-word thinking. Grokbot rewards a paragraph of context more than almost any other assistant, because it will then go and check the live web against it.
2. Not pushing back. Its default register is confident. That's a feature when it's right and a trap when it isn't. "What's the strongest argument against what you just told me?" is the single most valuable follow-up you can type.
3. Assuming it knows you. It knows your public activity, not your life. Six weeks in, most people are still re-explaining their job, their project and their constraints at the top of every conversation.

That third one is the only one that doesn't get better with practice — it's structural. See why Grokbot forgets you for what's actually happening and what to do about it.