Meta Launches Muse AI Agent to Handle Email, Shopping, Travel
The personal agent can send emails, book trips and make purchases, but requires users to give it access to apps and services across their digital lives.
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Meta has launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can carry out everyday tasks across apps and websites, pushing its artificial intelligence strategy beyond chatbots that primarily answer questions.
Muse is rolling out in the US on the web, iOS and Android and can also be used through WhatsApp. Support for Meta’s AI glasses is planned later.
Users can connect services including email, calendars, payments, shopping, health and fitness and smart-home apps. Meta says Muse can send emails, book travel, fill out forms, create plans and make purchases. It can also turn a recipe saved on Instagram into a grocery list.
Users choose which services to connect and what access to grant. Where a direct integration is unavailable, Muse can use a browser to complete tasks.
Powered by Meta’s Muse Spark model, the agent can continue working after a user closes the app and return when it needs approval or circumstances change. It can also remember information from past conversations and use it to make suggestions.
Muse will be free at launch, with paid plans priced at $20 a month for Power and $100 a month for Maximum for higher usage. Purchases can initially be completed through Stripe’s Link, with other checkout integrations planned.
The launch also raises a more difficult question for Meta than whether its AI works well. The product requires users to hand over access to some of the most sensitive parts of their digital lives.
Meta says Muse operates inside a dedicated secure virtual computer and that a separate Sentinel agent monitors activity. The company also says Muse cannot see users’ passwords or payment credentials and that conversations are not shared with Meta’s advertising systems.
Those assurances are likely to face scrutiny given Meta’s privacy record. Facebook paid a record $5 billion penalty in a 2019 settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it violated an earlier privacy order and misled users about control of their personal information.
The same year, Facebook disclosed that some user passwords had been stored in readable form in its internal systems, affecting hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users and millions of Instagram users. The company said it found no evidence the passwords had been abused or improperly accessed.
Muse enters a growing market for AI agents designed to act rather than simply respond. For Meta, its reach across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook gives it a large potential audience. Whether users will grant an AI agent enough access to make it genuinely useful may prove the harder test.
