Meta's Muse AI now calls businesses for paying US users

Meta's Muse calling feature follows a path first shown by Google Duplex in 2018, which demonstrated AI booking restaurant reservations and prompted widespread amazement. Duplex also revealed a practical obstacle: on launch, one in four calls was handled by a human. Meta encountered a similar problem, with many businesses hanging up the moment they detect an AI on the line, which forced the company to temporarily test human operators for Muse in September. Synthetic voices keep getting more realistic, making detection increasingly difficult, but the friction is not fully resolved.

The competitive field is already crowded. Google's Gemini, startup Instinct and xAI's Grok Bot can place calls, while OpenAI's ChatGPT Dots and Anthropic's Claude Duet cannot yet. Meta's differentiator may be scale: AI chief Alexandr Wang says the agent has more than 10 million users. Users are drawn largely because the AI will sit on hold indefinitely and work through complex phone menus without complaint, a patience advantage over human callers.