Meta Adds Live Video Chat, Voice Calls to Muse Assistant; Zuckerberg Calls It Future "Personal Superintelligence"

Meta announced a major feature expansion for its Muse AI assistant on Wednesday during the company's Connect keynote, adding live video chat, real-time voice conversations with customizable voice options, and a dedicated email address for each user's agent. The update comes just over two weeks after Muse's initial debut on September 8.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Connect audience he expects "Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives." The claim remains unverified — Muse has been publicly available for roughly two weeks.

New Retail Partners, Novel Business Model

Meta announced new retail integrations for Muse, including Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, and Wayfair. Notably absent from the list is Amazon, which has declined to allow Muse integration — a gap that has reportedly contributed to a stock selloff in recent days amid investor concern that AI agents could weaken the direct relationship between brands and customers.

Zuckerberg described Meta's monetization approach for Muse as unconventional: "We believe that Muse will make you money, and we're standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens, with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions." Pricing details for token limits beyond the free tier were not disclosed.

Meta said Muse is coming to its AI glasses lineup "in the coming months," without providing a specific launch date.

Hardware Announcements

Beyond software, Meta debuted several hardware products at the event:

• Handheld AI device: Meta teased a forthcoming handheld AI device but provided no specifications, pricing, or release timeline. The device would compete with a similar product reportedly in development at OpenAI.
• Audio-only glasses: Meta's first camera-free glasses, priced starting at $349, launch in October. The open-ear design targets users who want an always-available AI assistant without a camera.
• Meta Ray-Ban and Meta Glasses updates: Incremental design and feature updates to existing camera-equipped glasses lines.
• VR headset: A significantly slimmer VR headset is planned for spring at $1,299. It offloads computing, battery, and storage to a separate wired puck, enabling a 5K display in a headset weighing just 100 grams. The device relies entirely on voice, hand gestures, and eye gaze for control — no handheld controllers required for native titles, though older Quest games will need controllers. Meta says more than 75 hand-tracked games will be available at launch.

Privacy Push

Meta is building out privacy infrastructure to accompany the AI expansion. The company previously disclosed a confidential virtual machine option for Muse and on Wednesday added details on "Private Processing" for AI glasses — a system intended to keep data protected during cloud processing, comparable to Apple's Private Cloud Compute. Meta said the system is functional and it hopes to ship it to glasses by year-end, but has not committed to a firm date.

What this means

Meta is betting that AI and wearables convergence — not either technology alone — is the next computing platform. The retail partnership list positions Muse as a transaction layer between consumers and commerce, which explains both Meta's fee-based monetization model and Amazon's reluctance to participate; ceding a direct customer relationship to a third-party agent has real strategic cost for any retailer, and Amazon evidently sees more downside than upside. Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" framing is aspirational messaging rather than a technical claim — no benchmarks, model architecture, or capability metrics were disclosed alongside it. The more concrete signal is the hardware roadmap: shifting compute to a wired puck to hit a 100-gram, 5K headset suggests Meta is prioritizing wearable form factor over standalone processing power, a design bet that depends heavily on Muse and future models running reliably off-device.