Everything new coming to Meta’s AI agent Muse

Meta is pushing its new AI agent Muse far harder, far faster than most product launches get this early. The assistant only showed up in early September, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the opening of Connect in Menlo Park on Wednesday to frame it as the centerpiece of Meta’s consumer AI push.

Muse is meant to do the annoying parts of daily life by linking into email, calendars, and other accounts. Meta says it will also live on Meta AI glasses if users want that, and it runs on Muse Spark, the company’s multimodal model for agent-like work. Zuckerberg went big on the promise, saying he expects Muse to grow into a personal superintelligence used by billions of people. He also said Meta will keep the service free for a large amount of usage and later take a small cut from transactions.

The flashiest addition is a digital avatar. Meta says Muse users will be able to create a distinct face, body, and voice for their agent and then video chat with it in real time. That feature uses a new model called Muse Realtime Avatar, and it gives Meta’s previously faceless software something much more social, and a little bit more Metaverse-adjacent.

There’s also a more practical push. Meta says Muse will work through smart glasses using a wake word, and it should be able to walk someone through a workout, log meals, book appointments, and help buy products they see. The company says it will run in the background and check back when tasks are finished. The rollout is coming in “the coming months.”

Meta is also bringing Muse to Mac, where it will be able to work across desktop apps and keep going even after the user walks away. And it wants Muse inside email, too: the company says the agent will get its own email address, with support for adding it to threads or forwarding messages for handling. On the shopping side, Meta has lined up Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, and retail partners including Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, and Wayfair, plus Expedia and soon Instacart. It also says more than 1,500 developers applied in less than a week to build their own connectors.