Meta's AI Agent Muse Now Calls American Businesses So You Don't Have To: Paying Customers Only, From 20 Dollars a Month

Meta has let its AI agent Muse phone American businesses on behalf of its users. The feature has been in testing since September with a small group of early users who had to request access themselves. Now everyone gets it - but only if they pay.

The price is spelled out clearly. Subscriptions start at 20 dollars (about 18 euros) a month for 500 million tokens a week, and for heavier users there's a 100 dollar (about 90 euro) plan for 3 billion tokens. According to Meta, Muse already has more than 10 million users. Free users will soon get their own email address inside Muse, but the phone stays behind the paywall. The agent is free while you're getting used to it. The moment it starts saving you time, you pay.

The feature was announced by Alexandr Wang, Meta's top AI executive and head of its Superintelligence Labs division. The examples he gave are painfully familiar: a call to the cable company, to the driver's licence office, to a restaurant that doesn't take online bookings. Calls where you wait on hold, punch numbers through endless menus and in the end get transferred to another department. Who hasn't been through that at least once?

Meta isn't alone. The startup Instinct and Google's Gemini already offer something similar. The problem is on the other end of the line: plenty of businesses and receptionists hang up as soon as they realise they aren't talking to a human. But AI voices sound more natural by the month, and telling a customer apart from a machine speaking on their behalf will only get harder. So who answers for what the agent agreed to on the phone?

For now, Muse only calls businesses in the US. But the idea will sell anywhere people are stuck on hold. It remains to be seen whether users will end up paying for it through subscriptions, or businesses will answer with bots of their own - so machines talk to machines, and the human waits for the result.