Meta Muse Gets Avatars, Glasses and Mac Control at Connect

Most consumer AI assistants have so far lived inside a chat window. You ask a question, get an answer and move on. That works for looking something up. It works less well for someone who wants software to book the appointment, answer the email and order the replacement part without supervision.

Meta is betting that consumer AI is heading toward that second kind of use. Its personal agent, Muse, went live in early September. Only weeks later, the company used its annual Connect event in Menlo Park to add a long list of features. Mark Zuckerberg opened the keynote on Wednesday and left little doubt about the company's priorities.

"The centerpiece of our vision for what we're building is Muse," he said. He added that he expects Muse to "grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives."

What Muse is built to do

Muse connects to a user's apps and services, including email and calendars, and works across their devices and digital accounts. It runs on Muse Spark, a multimodal model Meta designed for agentic work. Meta presents it as easier to start with than rival agents: an assistant meant to take over routine busywork from the first day. According to Zuckerberg, its physical avatar is called Jolly.

The business model is also taking shape. Muse will be free for a large volume of tokens. Over time, Meta expects to make money by "taking a small fee from transactions." Put simply, Meta plans to earn when Muse helps its users spend or earn money.

A face, a voice and a video call

The most visible addition is a digital avatar. Users will be able to create a distinct character for their agent and video chat with it in real time. The feature runs on a new model called Muse Realtime Avatar. The avatar gets a face, a body and a voice, and users can give it tasks or ask it questions during a live conversation. The onstage demo carried a clear echo of Meta's earlier metaverse ambitions.

From glasses to the desktop

Muse is also coming to Meta's smart glasses. A wake word activates the agent. It can then guide a personalised workout, log meals, book an appointment or help buy a product the wearer is looking at. Meta says the agent will keep working in the background and check back in once a task is done. The company gave no firm date beyond "the coming months."

On the desktop, Meta shared more detail about bringing Muse to the Mac, a plan it had mentioned before. Users will be able to delegate tasks, and Muse will be able to operate any app on the computer, much like popular agents from OpenAI and Anthropic. Giving an agent that level of control raises its own questions about where the security boundary sits. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang described the appeal in practical terms: "You can walk away from your computer and it keeps working for you on all the jobs you lined up."

The agent keeps running while the user is away, so it will also get its own email address. Wang said the feature is in development and will arrive "soon," but he gave no precise timeline. Users will also be able to add Muse to email threads or forward messages for it to handle.

Shopping is the commercial core

The retail partnerships show how the transaction-fee model is meant to work. According to Wang, Muse can browse Shopify's full product catalogue as an agent. It can use Lync, and now Shop Pay, to buy almost anything online. Meta has also partnered with Stripe and expanded support for PayPal payments.

New retail partners include Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart and Wayfair. Muse will connect to their apps and to Expedia, with Instacart to follow. Beyond shopping, the lineup includes connectors for GitHub, Granola and Notion.

Opening the platform to developers

Meta also wants small businesses on board. It recently opened its platform so developers can build their own connectors. According to Wang, the company received more than 1,500 applications in under a week. "I think this could be a generational opportunity to start building for a new platform as it takes off," he said.

Why this matters

For an agent like this, payments, calendars, email and shopping are not separate problems. An agent that cannot send email cannot confirm a booking. An agent that cannot pay cannot finish a purchase. Meta's announcements tie these pieces together, and its monetisation plan depends on that link, because the company only earns when Muse completes transactions.

The open question is less about the model's capabilities. It is whether users will trust Muse with their inboxes, their computers and their payment details. Several of the new features have no fixed launch date yet, so that test is still to come.