Instinct and Meta's Muse AI agents can now place phone calls

Two rival agents pick up the phone

Text-based AI assistants have taken a step toward acting in the physical world. According to TechCrunch, Instinct — a San Francisco startup among the most popular in its category — and Meta's Muse agent have both added the ability to place real phone calls on users' behalf, with the two announcements landing on the same day.

Instinct Concierge arrives in early access

Instinct founder Noah Shinn announced the feature on X under the name Instinct Concierge. Pitched as a premium, hands-on service, it is aimed at situations where a chat window is not enough: securing a table at a restaurant that takes no online bookings, getting onto a dentist's cancellation list, or untangling a cable bill over the phone.

The capability is currently limited to a subset of users in early access, with a broader rollout planned over time, Shinn said.

Muse answers with calls to U.S. businesses

Meta's Muse, which launched the week before, gained outbound calling to U.S. businesses at almost the same moment. TechCrunch reports the feature reaches users who explicitly ask Muse to place a call first. Meta frames this as a request-driven rollout: whenever Muse ships new capabilities, they arrive earliest with the people who asked for them.

A differentiator erased

Calling had been a selling point among Instinct's competitors — a market that also includes the assistants Wajo, Town and Ollie. With Concierge now shipping, TechCrunch observes that those rivals no longer hold an advantage on this front, and the category has effectively reached parity on phone calls.

Agents keep extending their reach

The calling launch is part of a broader expansion at Instinct. In the same week, the company began issuing email addresses to its agents so they can register accounts and manage them on a user's behalf. It also introduced a way for one person's assistant to contact another person's assistant to coordinate tasks, enabled by adding both users to a trusted network.

Momentum on both sides

Both products are attracting real attention. Instinct raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation the month before, and TechCrunch reports it is now in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Muse, meanwhile, is outperforming Meta's own benchmarks: Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch shows the app passed 730,000 U.S. downloads in its opening days, ahead of the 707,000 the Meta AI app recorded in its first five days after launch, and at one point it climbed to number 2 on the top charts.

Why it matters

Much of the service economy still runs on the telephone — small restaurants, medical offices, utilities. Until now, text-based agents could only act where there was an app, a website or an API. Giving them a voice channel opens up the long tail of tasks that previously required a human to sit on hold.

It also shows how quickly advantages evaporate in this market: a capability that competitors advertised as unique was matched within days by the category leader and a tech giant simultaneously. The open questions are now practical rather than technical — how agents identify themselves on calls, who is accountable when a booking goes wrong, and how the people answering these calls adapt to AI on the line. As calling becomes standard across assistants, competition shifts from whether an agent can act to how well it does.