Meta announced new ways to contact and use its Muse AI agent on 23 September: dedicated email addresses, live video conversations with an avatar and the ability to operate Mac applications, The Verge reported. The changes would give Muse routes into an email exchange and a computer desktop alongside the chat interface through which people have chiefly used it.
Key points
- Each Muse agent is to receive an email address for communication and tasks.
- Live video conversations will use an avatar whose movement is informed by Meta’s Muse Realtime Avatar model.
- The Muse Mac app is to gain the ability to operate applications directly.
- Apptopia estimates Muse drew 2.8 million total installs globally in its first 12 days.
Muse gets an email address
Meta plans to give individual Muse agents addresses that they can use to accomplish tasks and at which people can contact them. An address makes the agent reachable within a continuing correspondence, rather than requiring every request to begin in Muse’s chat interface. A message sent that way could also contain material written by someone other than the person who set up the agent.
Sorting an email thread could involve writing to Muse at its own address instead of moving a request into a separate chat. That would make the exchange another route for asking the agent to carry out a task, if the planned feature works as described. The practical change is where the request could start, not a claim about how well Muse would complete it.
Email would also provide another place from which Muse receives instructions while working for its owner. The proposed Mac capability extends where it can act. Those two changes matter together for anyone deciding what access to give an agent: a request could arrive through an inbox, while carrying it out could involve software on the owner’s computer. Meta presented both as forthcoming capabilities.
Muse Realtime Avatar adds live video
Meta also plans to let people speak with a Muse avatar during a live video conversation. People can already change the avatar’s appearance, and Meta will add controls for how it sounds. A new model called Muse Realtime Avatar will inform the avatar’s movements, bringing an animated figure into an interaction that has primarily taken place through text chat.
The model’s stated role is specific: it informs how the avatar moves. Video conversation is a separate change to how a person communicates with Muse, while the voice and appearance controls affect its presentation. Taken together, the additions would let the same agent appear and respond in a call as well as receive a written request through its new address.
Meta plans to bring Muse to its smart glasses in the coming months, according to The Verge. The proposed interaction would allow someone wearing the glasses to talk with Muse about what they are looking at. That would give the agent a visual subject for a conversation, distinct from the avatar people would see when speaking to Muse over video.
The Muse Mac app moves into applications
The Muse Mac app is to gain computer-use capabilities, allowing the agent to operate applications directly. A chat response can describe what to do in an application; computer-use would let the agent work inside it. The distinction is much like receiving directions for changing something on a screen versus giving another party control of the screen’s controls.
That changes the practical scope of a request for companies building workflows around Muse. Email would make the agent contactable, while Mac control would offer a way to carry out work in desktop applications. Each addition concerns a different part of a task: how it reaches the agent, and where the agent could act on it.
The prospect of wider computer access follows an early security issue: AI Affairs reported a zero-day vulnerability in Muse disclosed by macOS security researcher Patrick Wardle. Meta has also extended Muse beyond conversations in another direction, adding a Shop Pay checkout integration with Shopify.
Apptopia estimates 2.8 million Muse installs
Muse launched on 8 September. In its first 12 days, it recorded an estimated 2.8 million total installs globally, according to Apptopia figures reported by TechCrunch. These are third-party estimates of mobile activity, rather than Meta’s own figures, and they describe the app’s early reach before the newly announced email, video and Mac features arrive.
For a comparison with ChatGPT’s mobile launch, Apptopia restricted its download figures to iOS in the US and Canada over the first 12 days for each app. It estimated 1.8 million downloads for Muse and 1.3 million for ChatGPT in that set. The restriction matters because Muse was available on iOS and Android in those markets, whereas ChatGPT’s mobile launch was global but limited to iOS.
Apptopia also estimated 642,000 daily active users for Muse’s US mobile app at that point, against 231,000 for ChatGPT at the corresponding point after its launch. Narrowing that comparison to iOS alone, the firm estimated 359,000 daily active Muse users, TechCrunch reported.
