Meta opens Muse Voice video chat with its AI avatar to all US users

Muse Voice reaches all US users

Meta has opened Muse Voice to everyone in the United States, according to TechCrunch. The feature lets people place calls and hold video chats with Muse, the company's consumer AI agent, and the rollout was announced on Thursday through a blog post and a demo posted on X by Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang.

The capability first appeared at Meta's Connect developer conference in September. Two new models sit underneath it: Muse Realtime Avatar, which powers the on-screen character, and Muse Realtime Voice, which handles the spoken side of the exchange.

An avatar with a face and a personality

Where several AI competitors stop at voice, Muse presents itself visually. The default is a small animated avatar nicknamed Jolly, and users can reshape it into something more human, an animal, or another character of their choosing. People can talk to it, ask questions, or hand off tasks for the agent to handle on their behalf.

Meta's bet, as TechCrunch reports, is that putting a face on the agent will make people feel closer to it, and that the sense of connection deepens once conversations happen live rather than through typed prompts. The company says the avatar reacts as it speaks, adjusting its expressions and movements to match the mood of the conversation.

Wang's demo illustrated the tone Meta is aiming for. His Muse, rendered as a fluffy white dog, ribbed him back after he joked that his habit of posting memes on X might have landed him in trouble with his boss, suggesting he attach disclaimers to any posts that could be mistaken for Meta endorsing something risqué.

Software arriving ahead of hardware

The timing points toward Meta's wider device plans. The company intends to ship a Tamagotchi-style wearable for Muse before the end of the year, and once it arrives the avatar will appear on the gadget's small screen, letting owners speak to the agent and have it respond or carry out tasks for them.

For now, real-time Muse conversations run on mobile, on the web, and on the Mac. According to TechCrunch, support is set to follow for Meta's AI Glasses and for a forthcoming hardware product called the Muse Charm.

Why it matters

The rollout signals where Meta thinks the next phase of consumer AI competition will be fought: not on raw model capability alone, but on whether people form habits, and attachments, around one particular agent. Giving Muse a persistent, customizable face is a deliberate attempt to build that stickiness.

It also front-loads the software experience ahead of the hardware. A Tamagotchi-like device only works if users already recognize and care about the creature on its screen, so seeding Muse Voice widely on phones and desktops creates the audience the wearable will need at launch.

The strategy is not without tension. Meta is explicitly engineering emotional closeness into an AI product, framing the anthropomorphized avatar as a strength. If it becomes the primary way millions of people talk to Meta's AI, questions about how attached users should become to software designed to feel like a companion will move from the edges of the conversation to the center of the product itself.