Instinct Concierge, Meta's Muse both add AI phone calls

Text-based AI assistants have become a crowded race, with Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta's Muse competing for users' attention and tasks. Meta launched Muse last week, and it has already gained traction: Sensor Tower noted Muse outgrew the Meta AI app launch in the first few days, with over 730,000 U.S. downloads compared to Meta AI's 707,000 in the same window, and it briefly reached the No. 2 spot in the top charts. Instinct, for its part, has been shipping quickly — last week it rolled out email addresses so the assistant could handle account sign-ups and management, and added a trusted network letting users' assistants contact other people's assistants.

The calling feature is the latest front in that rivalry. Before Instinct's Concierge rollout, several rivals had been touting their ability to make calls as an advantage over Instinct; now they are all in parity on that front. Meta's Muse also gained the ability to call U.S. businesses, with the feature first going to users who asked Muse for it — a mechanism Meta says will apply to future features as well.

What happens next comes down to how quickly both rollouts widen. Instinct Concierge is only in early access, with plans to expand later, and Meta's gating means only some Muse users can try calling now. Instinct's reported $10 billion talks also suggest investors see the assistant category as one that can navigate different surfaces for users — but if calling stops being a differentiator, the fight may shift to assistant-to-assistant tasks.