Publication
An AI Tamagotchi 🎁
Meta has unveiled Muse Charm, a pocket-sized home for its Muse AI agent. But do we really need another device to carry and charge?
An AI Tamagotchi 🎁
Meta* has unveiled Muse Charm, a pocket-sized device with a screen for an avatar of its Muse AI agent. Touch the fingerprint scanner and you can start talking. It's promised for December.
But haven't we seen this before with Rabbit r1? That little box also promised to carry out your requests. At launch, it was slow, buggy, short on features and full of unfinished integrations. In WIRED's review, the writer repeatedly pulled out a phone to finish tasks the assistant couldn't handle. So you had to carry two gadgets and do both their jobs yourself.
Meta now has a new Muse agent aimed squarely at everyday tasks: sorting through email, planning trips, helping with shopping. The company already promises these features in an app; now the agent has a physical home too.
Given Meta's experience with smart glasses, it probably understands better than most what people ask a personal agent to do. Can Muse handle those requests well? Another rhetorical question...
For me, though, the bigger obstacle is the hardware. These days, carrying one more gadget without a compelling reason is a real luxury. Glasses are one thing: besides sitting on your face, they do have other uses. But a trinket with no obvious benefit brings back the question: “Why, Mark, WHY?!” We already have a whole fleet of devices to carry and charge — phone, watch, earbuds. Now they want to add a Tamagotchi, a little creature in your pocket demanding attention 👊
Why not put an agent like this in a wireless-earbud case? Or in the earbuds themselves? At least people already carry and charge those.
This makes it the second device from Meta Connect that, to me, looks like an attempt to improve on someone else's unsuccessful idea. The new VR glasses have Vision Pro behind them; this Tamagotchi has Rabbit.
Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.