Rival AI agents, Instinct and Meta’s Muse, both add the ability to make calls
TechCrunch Ivan Mehta
Instinct and Meta’s Muse can now make phone calls for you. That erases one of the few clear edges rivals had over them.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta — read the original for the full story.
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Text-based AI assistants are turning into a knife fight. Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta’s Muse are all chasing the same promise: let the bot handle the annoying stuff so people don’t have to. Now two of the biggest names in that race have added the same missing piece. They can call businesses on your behalf.
Instinct, the San Francisco startup that’s reportedly drawing investor attention at a $10 billion valuation, has launched Instinct Concierge. Noah Shinn said on X that it can book restaurants that don’t take online reservations, get a user onto a dentist’s cancellation list, and deal with cable bill problems. The rollout starts in early access for some users, with a wider release planned later.
Meta’s Muse moved at the same time. Meta said the assistant can now place calls to U.S. businesses, with the feature first appearing for people who ask Muse to make a call. The company also said that when Muse gets new capabilities, the people who ask about them will see them first. That’s a neat little feature-request loop, and very Meta: build the feedback into the product and call it a system.
The timing matters because calling was one of the talking points rivals used against Instinct. That argument doesn’t hold anymore. On this front, everyone’s in the same place now, and the market has shifted back to the harder question: who actually does the best job once the phone starts ringing?
Instinct hasn’t been standing still either. Last week it added email addresses so its assistants can handle account sign-up and management, and it also introduced a trusted network that lets one person’s assistant contact another person’s assistant for certain tasks. The company raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation last month, and is reportedly in talks for another round at $10 billion. Meta’s Muse, meanwhile, has already shown some pull of its own, with Sensor Tower saying its app got over 730,000 U.S. downloads in the first five days and briefly hit No. 2 in the charts.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of AI assistants that actually matters: not chat, but chores. Anyone can demo a bot that sounds clever; making a real phone call without turning into a mess is the sort of boring win that people will pay for. The industry keeps pretending the race is about intelligence, when it’s really about who can survive a hold line and a callback number.
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