Meta puts Muse at center of Connect 2026 with Charm

Meta has been building Muse's reach across its app, WhatsApp, the web and Mac, and Connect 2026 marks the point where it starts pushing the agent into hardware. The partner lineup — Walmart and PayPal as new additions, GitHub and Box for work, with Shopify catalogue access predating the event — signals that Meta wants Muse to move beyond conversation into actions like shopping and workplace tasks. Meta also previewed Muse Realtime Avatar, pairing generated avatar video with synchronized speech; in Meta's own evaluation, raters preferred Muse overall to Runway Characters and HeyGen LiveAvatar during conversations lasting two to three minutes with matched avatar identities, though the mannerisms comparison with Runway showed no statistically clear preference.

Meta's hardware ambitions rest on an audience it already has. In a June 23 joint announcement, Meta and EssilorLuxottica described Ray-Ban Meta as the world's bestselling AI glasses and said millions of consumers already wear products from their range of AI glasses. For a company criticized for its virtual reality spending, an agent people actually use could give consumers a reason to try AI glasses, and the glasses could return the favor by supplying the visual context behind a request.

The catch is that usefulness depends on parties Meta does not control. Axios reported that Amazon moved to block Muse earlier this week, showing how another company's access rules can limit what an agent can do. Meta says it plans to bring Private Processing to glasses so AI experiences can run without anyone, including Meta, seeing the data, but the scope of that protection across features and outside services remains unclear. Whether Muse becomes a lasting habit — rather than a viral moment — is likely to hinge on whether these integrations go live, what each permits, and how easily users can correct mistakes.