Only a few weeks had passed since the launch of Meta's new AI assistant "Muse" before the tech giant began revealing its grand ambitions in the field of consumer-oriented artificial intelligence. At the annual Connect conference held in Menlo Park, CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened the event with a keynote that laid out the company's full bet on this assistant, introducing a package of new features and integrations aimed at making it an essential part of users' daily lives.

What Is Muse and Why Is Meta Betting on It?

"Muse" was launched in early September as a personal AI agent capable of performing daily tasks by connecting to users' apps and services, including email and calendar. The assistant relies on the multimodal "Muse Spark" model that Meta developed specifically for agentic work. The company promotes it as an assistant that is easier to use than its competitors, allowing users to automate routine tasks from the very first moment.

Zuckerberg described the assistant as the "cornerstone" of the company's vision, expressing his expectation that it will evolve over the coming years into a "personal superintelligence" used by billions of people to achieve their goals and improve their lives.

The Revenue Model: Free Now, Fees Later

Zuckerberg noted that Meta will provide "Muse" for free for a huge number of tokens, with plans to generate profits later by taking a small fee from the transactions the assistant conducts. He also believes this tool could generate income for the users themselves before it does for the company.

Key New Features

The conference introduced a set of additions worth highlighting, most notably:

An Interactive Digital Avatar: Users will soon be able to create a distinctive digital persona for their assistant and speak with it via live video calls, thanks to a new model called "Muse Realtime Avatar," giving the assistant a face, voice, and body that make it feel closer to the user.
Integration with Smart Glasses: Users will be able to communicate with the assistant by speaking to Meta's smart glasses, activated by a wake word to help with workouts, logging meals, booking appointments, and purchasing products.
Working on Mac Devices: The assistant will be able to operate any desktop application and perform tasks on the user's behalf, similar to AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic.
A Dedicated Email Address: Given its continuous work in the background, "Muse" will receive its own email address, allowing it to be added to email conversations or having messages forwarded to it for processing.

Extensive Partnerships to Support Shopping and Work

Meta has forged partnerships with major companies such as Stripe and Shopify, affirming that it views "Muse" as an important shopping tool. According to the company's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, the assistant can access Shopify's entire product catalog and use payment services such as Shop Pay and PayPal to purchase almost anything online.

The company also announced a series of new partnerships with retailers, including:

Best Buy, Gap, and Sephora
Walmart and Wayfair
Expedia and Instacart (coming soon)
Productivity tools such as GitHub, Notion, and Granola

An Open Platform for Developers

Wang explained that the company aims to connect "Muse" to small businesses as well, after opening its platform to developers to build their own connectors. The company received more than 1,500 applications in less than a week, which he described as an "exceptional opportunity" to build on a new platform at the start of its launch.

Although Meta did not specify exact release dates for many of these features, it confirmed that most of them will become available "in the coming months." It is clear that the company is betting on "Muse" to be its most prominent gateway to consumer AI at scale.

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