📰 Key Takeaways

After an initial test in September, Meta’s consumer AI agent Muse can now call U.S. businesses on a user’s behalf, but only for paid subscribers. Muse has passed 10 million users, and Meta hopes features like call-making that take chores off your to-do list will turn consumer AI into an everyday product. Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer and head of Superintelligence Labs, said the feature can handle the calls people don’t want to make themselves, like calling a cable company, the DMV, or a restaurant that doesn’t offer online reservations. Before, only a small group of early users could try it, and only after asking the AI for access. Now any paid subscriber can make these requests. Muse subscriptions start at $20 a month with 500 million Muse tokens per week; heavy users can pick a $100 a month plan with 3 billion tokens.

Call-making isn’t unique to Muse. The startup Instinct and Google’s Gemini offer similar features. But the reception has been mixed, and many businesses and front-desk staff just hang up once they realize the caller isn’t a real person. Still, as AI gets better at mimicking human voices, it will get harder and harder to tell whether the caller is the customer or an AI acting on their behalf.

The feature could appeal to consumers who are fed up with customer service, since they’ve had to deal with endless phone menus, long waits for a real person, and getting transferred between departments. Now an AI with unlimited patience can do it for them. For now, calling is still paid-only, but Wang said this week that Muse’s recently added dedicated email address feature will soon be opened up to free users.

💬 JudyAI Lab Take

Meta’s Muse can now call U.S. businesses on your behalf, and it has already passed 10 million users. That shows consumer AI agents moving from answering questions to getting annoying real-world tasks done, though for now it’s only available to paid subscribers.

For AI builders, the lesson here is that the easiest agent features to get people to accept are often the chores they didn’t want to do anyway. The cable company, the DMV, and restaurants without online reservations that Alexandr Wang mentioned are exactly this kind of scenario. Muse starts there, pairs it with a subscription from $20 a month, and packages “taking things off your to-do list” as an everyday product. Meanwhile, Instinct and Google’s Gemini offer similar features, so this direction is no longer one product’s selling point. But the original article also points out the risk: quite a few businesses and front-desk staff hang up as soon as they realize the caller isn’t a real person, and the more human the AI voice sounds, the harder that is to detect. Being technically able to do something doesn’t mean the other side will cooperate, so when you design an agent, you have to factor in whether the receiving end will trust it.

If you’re designing an AI feature that interacts with the outside world, ask yourself one question first: if the other party finds out it’s an AI, can the flow still continue?

📅 Original Article Info

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