GoKawiilMeta has revealed its long-promised personal AI agent that requires "no technical experience" to set up. Called Muse, Meta says the agent is able to complete a wide range of actions on users' behalf, including online shopping, drafting and sending emails, planning trips and other productivity-focused tasks.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said that he wants Meta to create agents that can work proactively to help people get things done, but in a more accessible format than other platforms like OpenClaw. Muse, which has its own dedicated apps and website, is more capable than the Meta AI assistant because it can handle complex tasks and work independently. "Once a person shares a goal with Muse, it helps them develop a personalized plan and coordinate their time and resources, then advances the work on its own," the company explains in a blog post.
Exactly what Muse is capable of doing for you will depend on how much of your digital life you're willing to give it access to. Muse can connect to Meta's own apps, as well as a range of third-party services like Google Workspace, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, Spotify and Apple Health. For example, you could ask Muse to look through all the recipe videos you've saved on Instagram and Facebook and organize them into a more readable format. And because it has shopping and browsing capabilities, Muse could then build grocery lists, compare prices and order the items on your behalf.
Muse is also able to set up its own connections to third-party services if a public API is available. "Because it is a very capable AI product that can also build its own software, it isn't really limited in what it can do," Vishal Shah, Meta's VP of AI Products, tells Engadget. "From a complexity perspective, you just have to get more and more comfortable with giving it access to more, and also telling it what's important to you, so it can be the most helpful it can be."
To actually do all that, though, requires a fair bit of trust in Meta and your agent. The company says it has built in a range of safeguards to prevent its agents from going rogue and to protect users' data. Muse will check in for approval before doing things like sending an email or completing a purchase, though it can complete more "low-risk" tasks without users' signoff. And behind the scenes, Muse runs on a dedicated virtual machine that's meant to keep each person's agent, and the data it can access, separate from everyone else's.
Even so, agents can be unpredictable and Meta says there will be some stumbles. "Muse can and will still make mistakes, but we expect they'll be much less frequent and cause much less damage due to the safety systems we've built in," the company writes in a blog post.
AI agents have been a central focus of Zuckerberg's vision to bring "superintelligence" to the masses. And the company seems to be envisioning a world in which their users constantly have a Muse agent running in the background, plugging away at personal tasks and more "audacious" goals. Meta is also incorporating the agent into WhatsApp and its smart glasses to make on-the-go interactions easier.
Asking people to share so much of their lives with a Meta AI product could be a tough ask for some. The company has recently faced a privacy backlash over its AI glasses, and a controversial feature that allowed people to generate AI images from public Instagram posts (Meta rolled back the update after public outcry).
On the privacy front, Meta is allowing users to opt-out of having their interactions with Muse be used for further AI training. And the company won't share details from conversations with Muse to its advertising systems, though some interactions like shopping could "indirectly" influence the ads people see, according to Meta. It's also not clear at what point Muse could require a Meta AI subscription. The company says "most of what people need" will be free, but those who want to "do more" will need to pay.