Muse can now place calls to U.S. businesses — if you pay

Meta's consumer AI assistant Muse can now place phone calls to U.S. businesses on behalf of any paid subscriber, the company said, expanding a feature that had been limited since testing began in September. Previously only a small group of early adopters could try calling after requesting access from the AI; now anyone who pays for Muse can hand off those tasks.

Muse has surpassed 10 million users, Meta said last month, as the company pushes to turn consumer AI into a mainstream everyday product. Calling, the company argues, removes one more item from a user's to-do list. Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer and head of Superintelligence Labs, framed the use case as the calls people would rather not make themselves: cable companies, the DMV, or a restaurant with no online reservation system. He promoted the rollout in a post announcing it as available now to paid subscribers in the U.S.

Pricing sets the boundary of access. Muse plans start at $20 per month for 500 million Muse tokens per week, while heavier users can pay $100 per month for 3 billion tokens. Calling remains a paid-only feature for now, though Wang said this week that the recently added ability to create a Muse email address will roll out to free users soon.

Muse is not alone in dialing businesses. Startup Instinct offers a comparable calling option, and Google's Gemini can do the same. The competitive question is less about capability than about what happens on the receiving end: businesses and receptionists often hang up as soon as they detect an AI on the line. At the same time, voice models increasingly imitate human speech, which the source notes will make it harder over time to distinguish a customer from an AI acting for that customer.

The pitch to consumers rests on accumulated frustration with customer service — phone trees, hold queues, and transfers to representatives who may not be able to help. An AI assistant with effectively unlimited patience could absorb that tedium instead of the caller. Whether the businesses on the other side will accept the arrangement, and how callers will be identified as they aren't, remains the open question as this feature moves from a limited test to general paid availability.