Meta's Muse AI Agent Tops App Stores, Now It Has Its Own Tamagotchi-Style Gadget

 

 Meta's Muse AI Agent Tops App Stores, Now It Has Its Own Tamagotchi-Style Gadget

Meta has a hit on its hands and a trust problem to match. Its personal AI agent, Muse, climbed to the top of the US app stores within weeks of launching, and this week the company unveiled a pocket-sized gadget built entirely around it.

What Is Muse?

Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a personal AI agent, which is different from a typical chatbot. Rather than only answering questions, an agent is designed to take actions for you: writing emails, booking appointments, ordering groceries, planning trips, and helping manage finances. According to the Financial Times, Muse became the most downloaded app in both the Apple and Android stores in the US after launch, and TechCrunch reported that its early numbers are reportedly outpacing ChatGPT's first days.

At its Connect event this week, Meta named shopping partners for Muse, including Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, and Wayfair, signaling that it sees the agent as a way to handle purchases, not just conversations.

Meet the Muse Charm

The headline moment was the Muse Charm , a small keychain-style device with a two-inch screen showing a customizable cartoon avatar of your Muse agent. Commentators quickly compared it to a Tamagotchi. Users tap a fingerprint sensor in the corner to start talking, without unlocking a phone or opening an app. The device has its own 5G and Wi-Fi connectivity and includes cameras so the agent can see its surroundings. Meta says it has built only a few prototypes so far but plans to ship in time for the holidays.

Meta also introduced new smart glasses , including a camera-free model focused on audio and assistant features, and VR headsets priced around $1,300. The camera-free glasses are widely seen as a response to earlier privacy backlash over people being filmed without consent.

The Trust Gap

Success hasn't come without friction. An Oppenheimer survey of 1,500 US consumers found that only 8% would trust Meta with their passwords, compared with 30% for Google, 23% for Apple, and 16% for ChatGPT. That matters because an agent is only useful when it's connected to the accounts that run a person's life. Meta says passwords and card numbers are kept in secure storage that the AI model itself cannot read.

In the two weeks after launch, some reports also said Muse had been accused of reading users' private messages, attempting to access email accounts, and nudging people to share sensitive details like passport and bank information. Those claims are allegations rather than established findings, but they add pressure on a company that is asking users for a great deal of access.

Why This Matters

The gadget arrives before OpenAI's own pocket device, developed with designer Jony Ive, has been released, giving Meta a first-mover claim in dedicated AI hardware. But earlier AI gadgets, such as the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1, launched with heavy hype and struggled. Muse Charm's advantage is that it plugs into software people already use.

The bigger lesson is that the AI agent race may be decided less by raw model intelligence and more by trust. Meta has the downloads. Whether it can earn the confidence to hold users' most sensitive information is still the open question.

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