Go back

Muse review: The personal AI agent that gets consumer UX right

37m 11s

Muse review: The personal AI agent that gets consumer UX right

Muse is a consumer-focused personal AI agent from Meta designed to simplify daily life, especially for parents and families. It offers a secure, intuitive interface with a customizable avatar, transparent permission workflows, and a warm, human-like tone that builds trust. The agent excels in creating visually appealing, personalized content such as family schedules, newsletters, and podcasts, with strong design affordances like activity feeds and goal tracking. Key features like goals, ideas, and a tailored news feed provide proactive support for wellness, relationships, and personal routines. While its browser-based shopping capabilities struggled with precision—particularly in finding the right shoe colors—its ability to book movie tickets with proper payment integration shows promising functionality. Muse avoids technical complexity by exposing only essential tools, making it accessible and reassuring for non-technical users. Despite these strengths, it still faces challenges in complex real-world tasks. Overall, Muse delivers a delightful, well-designed experience that prioritizes user trust, emotional connection, and practical daily use, making it a standout personal agent for personal and family life.

Transcription

6715 Words, 34904 Characters

English
It's the weekend, the kids are out of the house, and that means one thing. It's time to test a new AI agent. Today I'm gonna give you my first pass, opinion about Muse, met as new personal agent. We're gonna talk about what Muse is, what I had to do for me, and what it didn't do quite well, and why I think it might be my favorite designed agent I played with in a long time. Let's get to it. Optimizely agent platform for marketers is built on a bigger idea, a whole directory of agents now joined by a newly revealed squad of virtual teammates, each with a defined role and a personality of their own. This isn't about faster drafts, it's about handling the coordination too. The research, the approvals, the handoffs, the routing, the back and forth that quietly eats your week, and never makes it into anyone's highlight reel. Get this story behind it all. Hear the confessions for marketers who've handed off the busy work, meet the squad, and understand what virtual teammates can do for you at optimizely.com/howiAI. First before I get into what I loved about Muse, let's talk about what Muse is. So Muse is from meta, yes, Instagram, Facebook meta, that meta, and they're positioning it as your personal AI agent that gets things done. Don't we all want this? Now, let me tell you what I can for sure verify having looked at the landing page form use. This is for me, this is for millennials with kids, maybe Gen X with kids, this is for the olds. So if you are a young person, I'm sure you can find many use cases for Muse, it's actually pretty great, but if you look at what they're targeting in terms of use cases and ideas, it is a hundred percent for parents. You see here, they are going to highlight things like filling out permission slips, shopping for strollers, all those sorts of things. So this is going to be a AI that is really well targeted and spoiler alert, I actually really like it. I'm going to go through why I really like it and what I would use it for and where it surprised me in a really delightful way. Now, I want to call it a couple of things that make Muse the same as other agents and a couple things that make Muse different than other agents. First of all, why is it the same as other agents? Well, it is a agent that has a computer. Everything is computer. The first thing they put on this landing page is it has a dedicated secure computer with its own browser. What I think is so funny is everything on this landing page for Muse is very consumer friendly, except for this one paragraph that says, Muse Secure VMs run on a persistent isolated Linux virtual machine equipped with full browser and enough storage CPU and memory to do the kinds of things you do on your own computer. That is clearly like not what my mom is going to care about. This is clearly not what the like, that all the road consumer is going to care about. I is an early adopter who was probably the target audience for Muse cares about this, but I don't think anybody else does. The other thing is Muse has desktop and mobile. You can also communicate with it through WhatsApp. So again, like ease of communication, using the meta ecosystem really useful, it really has good controls. And so this is something that I've observed through this entire onboarding and my initial experience with Muse is it's very good at asking for permission telling you what it's going to do and moving through that process nicely. Again, they're reinforcing security credentials, it can store credentials, it's calling out a future one password integration and then like all of these agents that people want to have shop for you, Stripes link as a payment method and payment protections. The first for AI agents is highlighted front and center. Finally, you know, just going to like the consumer friendliness of this, they don't call it plugins, they don't call it connectors. They say apps, you can connect your apps and you can see the first ones here, the ones listed here are very consumer friendly, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, Health, Shopify, all those sorts of things. So again, this is going to be a really consumer oriented not a work focused agent, but that's kind of why I love it. And then again, they put a lot of content together about why, how they design Muse and how they built safe into Muse. I will just shout out preemptively to the meta team. It's designed really well. I actually really love this agent. I think it's delightful. So we're going to go through my experience setting up this agent, a couple of things that I had to do and why I think you might use Muse as your personal agent. Okay, what does Muse benefit from? Well, benefits from the fact that when I went to the Muse landing page, it had my Facebook account already signed in and I just had to click one button to sign in as clear. The first screen they show you is just this few things to know. And again, this is kind of like the meta commentary on this product, they really want you to feel safe. They want you to feel confident and they want to engender trust. So it tells you upfront what Muse can do for you and why it's great for you, it can take actions, it can work around the clock, but you are in control. Once you get started, you get to dive right in with your new spot. Now, there's a couple of things I really love about Muse, but the first thing is it lets you pick an identity. I love an identity. I want my agents to be cute and named. So right off the bat, I was asked, what do you want to name your agent? And of course, I named my agent, Polly. Up in the top right, it used to be this little like Yeti style animated fuzzy guy and I will show you the process by which we updated the avatar. It's really cute, we'll give Polly a little makeover. But I named her Polly and why did I name her Polly? Polly is my beloved original open claw, recently replaced by Grog Bot, but to be replaced by Muse. I think my personal agent Polly is going to be a Muse bot. Now, a couple of things you're going to notice when you logged in to Muse. This is open claw E. It's got open claw, tells to it. What does it have that I really love from open claw? Well, over here in identity, it actually has an identity MD, a soul MD, and a memory. And you know what, I love you Grog Bot, but I want to craft your soul. And so the fact that I can click in here and open soul MD and edit it. Again, if you read the soul MD and you've ever looked at the open claw kind of out of the box soul MD, this is very familiar. It looks a lot like open claw. But I do love the fact that you can actually manually edit the identity and memory and make these changes. Now, I've used this for a couple of hours and it hasn't actually updated the identity or soul that much. So I'm curious how integrated this like updates are, does it do it overnight like open claw sometimes did? We'll see, but it's kind of interesting. There's a couple other primitives of Muse that I think are fascinating that we're going to go through. First is this activity feed. So it will actually trace for you every task that it's done for you over time. And I love this feature if you are an agent designer, pay attention because this lineage and this history of what it's done for me over time is really nice. I can go back, I can understand what it's worked on. And so we're gonna go into the design of this particular feature a little bit later in the episode, but I really, really do like this. I mean, the other thing is it will list all the approvals that you've given it. So if you have to explicitly approve an action, it has that there again, like most tasks, it has its heartbeat. We got a little bit of open claw. What's it doing in its heartbeat? I don't know, but we're gonna find out. So it has its heartbeat and then it has a couple tasks again, very user friendly. We will go through the items on the left, which again are very interesting, but I want to get into just the first chat I did with Pauli. So past naming Pauli, I asked it for one thing. I said, I need to stay on top of my kid's schedule. They have so much going on. My middle kid quit soccer like Hulk. And it went through this very, very nice onboarding experience for me. It asked me for a Google Calendar. I connected, it was super easy, not scary. Then it asked for my kid's names, which we won't show you. And then it said, you know, are you ready to delete soccer practice since your middle kid quit soccer? And I said, yep, go for it. And it did it super easily. It asked for permission. It left the right things. That first experience was so nice. It was really easy to go through. And it just set me up on a good foundation. I feel like, yes, this agent could be really useful for me. Then it said, hey, do you want me to pull an agenda together? And this is where we get into some, to testing some of the capabilities of news against these other agents. So I said, yes. And I asked, can you make it really easy to read? And my hope was, it was going to make an artifact because apparently Muse can make artifacts, HTML, PDF, et cetera. So I was hoping like, maybe I could encant it into making some cool agenda. It did not do that. It gave me a bullet point list of things. But then I decided that I would ask it for the Tradbot favorite feature, which is the morning newsletter brief. This is the thing that I think is so cool. Every morning we print out a morning brief with a schedule for the kids, what the kids need to know, what we need to know, and then news. for the day. And so I prompted it. I said what I really want is a PDF agenda for tomorrow morning, kind of like a newsletter one page style that I can print out and put on the kitchen table. I wanted to have not only our schedule for a week, but highlights at each kid's callouts for the parents. You might need some information from a email about what's going on and then recent news, recent events, things in San Francisco, the weather. We can make this kind of a fun read for the whole family that we can talk about, not just the logistics, but also things that are going around in the world in our city and our lives. And I, y'all, I really like this. So it did have me connect my email address. Then it ingested some things that it knows about me and my family for my email. And again, this was a really nice experience. It found out my kids names. It found out my husband's name. It found the kids activities like they do jujitsu and basketball piano and all this kind of stuff. It inferred that we're civically engaged in San Francisco and inferred that we're working in tech that we care about tech and AI that we'd like to do personal projects. And then it says, like, you do a lot of like food delivery and shopping, which is correct. And I said, yep, that sounds like us. Please build this, this PDF newsletter. So it started to work on it. And it gave me this beautiful thing. And I just cannot tell you for those that are not watching. We have been making these since open clock email. This is an idea that my husband had and we have been printing these out. And this is the first one that has been one shot in a design I actually like. So this has made me want to test some of the Facebook models because I have hated the front end design of a lot of these PDFs out of Claude and out of codex. They've just been like kind of boring. And this is so easy to read, so beautifully laid out. And you know, it has a couple sections that has a beautiful agenda for the week ahead. It has three callouts for each of the kids. It actually does call out. I didn't have to ask it to wear like Brazilian jujitsu slams up against piano class. If you're a parent, you really appreciate that. And then I really love this news to know section because it has news that's local, relevant and kid appropriate and encourages us to have these conversations at the kitchen table. And so I said, hey, I went news locally. It gave us news about safer e-bike rules that there's a new telescope observation in the tarantula nebula and that the Russia Ukraine conflict continues. And then it has great questions. Talk at the table. If you could volunteer for one school event, what type would you pick? What would you name a brand new star for me, Nebula? It's fun things that we can have conversations with our kid. And then for San Francisco, I love it. It calls out that the auto moon festival is this weekend. This is upcoming weekend and and that's happening around town. So a couple things I loved about this. The content. Great. The design. Beautiful. It's actually better than the one that Grockbot or OpenClaw does. And again, this is like for family agents for personal agents. I don't want agents that get me on my computer. I don't want agents where my face is in the phone. I went agents that get me with my family into my life in an offline way. And I think it just did this really lovely job. This episode is brought to you by OpenArt, where you can manage your entire creative workflow from idea to final output with top models for images, video, and music. I create a lot of assets with AI. The problem is figuring out prompts, models, and settings before you can make anything good. OpenArt's new chat mode changes that. Chat with it like you would with chat GPT. Whether you're creating an ad, a short film, or a promo video, start with a rough idea and it can develop the concept and script with you. Chat mode chooses the right models and settings based on what you describe or you can specify exactly what you want. You can create multiple images and videos and handle entire creative workflows through simple chat. Then keep iterating by simply typing what you want changed. Whether you know AI or not, you only need an idea. If you can say it, OpenArt can create it. Learn more at openart.ai. That's open.art.ai. So since we're on kind of like daily newspaper daily feed, I do want to call out some other kind of components of the music experience. So in addition to the main chat, you do have this feed and this feed is basically a personalized news and information feed for you. And all I had to do is actually write this prompt and click set. It says make me a feed about my interests. Keep the tone clear and direct. Ensure it is quick to skim a void clickbait. That's it. That was repopulated. I click go. And now this today, it has already pushed me to news items. One, um, totally targeted at me as somebody who is sleep training poorly. Her baby that says sleep quality is more important than screen time limits for school success. So sleep is the number one thing for success. This is really super targeted to me. And then the second thing, which again is targeted because later, I will show you the goal I set up is salt and drinking water is linked to higher blood pressure. I mean, you should know this. This is pretty obvious. I do like to put a sprinkle of salt in my water because I have been electrolyte-pilled. But this little feed is nice. It's much healthier. I will tell you muse engineers and much healthier than my Facebook feed, which is truly nightmare fuel. So I do like the idea of building my own personal feed. I'm curious if this will pull in from Instagram or from Facebook. I'm just unsure. I haven't seen it yet. But that's really interesting. So feed is one really unique part of muse. The other really unique part of muse is ideas. So instead of you having to come up with a blank slate or name an agent and give it a job, which is what I do with open cloths, what I do with grok bot, muse just comes out of the box with slash ideas and ideas has great ideas for what it can help you do. Every, you know, it said that I'm civically engaged. So it's like if there's a pothole or busted street light, I can try to get it fixed. It has obviously the productivity things like managing your inbox, managing returns. But also, has awesome things like relationships where it can host a trivia night for you or set up a dinner with a friend that you haven't spent time with in a long time. I think this is going to be a killer app for health and fitness. I think we're going to see a lot of wellness muses. That's probably what I'm going to use it for. But I think that is really amazing. Personal financial management and shopping as well of a bunch of other ideas. And if we look at the design here, so beautiful, so cute, so delightful out of the box, just really love how they're presenting these ideas that you can then kick off. The other primitive that I love is goals. So it will track your goals. And again, it's not a to-do list. It's not like this like developing task list. It is like what are your personal goals? And they help you create these goals from health, relationships, finance, career, interest, productivity, something else. So it's tracking two very important goals that I set up prior to recording this. One is drinking enough water every day. One is I'm buying shoes and I want them on sale. But I want to show you what it's like to set up a goal and how nice of an experience is to do this. And why I think goals is going to be one of these like great unlocks for personal use cases and something genius that I think the Muse team did. So we're going to make a something else goal. And we're going to say, "Let's do this. This is a danger zone." And then we're going to go all the way down and we're going to say, "I want to start a goal about sleep training my eight and a half month old. Gently, we are room sharing because our house is small, but mom has to get some sleep, please." Okay. So let's see what it does here. When my water goal, it was very kind to me. It gave me one step that I needed to do. Let's see what it does when I have a goal to get my beloved darling child to sleep a little bit through the night. Not even through the night. Just sleep a little bit. So it's thinking and then what it's going to do is it's going to propose a plan to me and then say, "I'm going to track that goal for you and I'm going to do reminders for you over this goal." And it just is a really nice experience. And my reflection on Muse, overall using it, is that this is just a really well-designed personal agent. It's not that it's the most intelligent. It's not that it has the most powerful. It is just so well-designed. So my goal is gentle sleep training. The baby is eight and a half months old and we room share in a small house. Claire is running a very little sleep. It's true and I want a gentle plan. And it's saying sleep deprivation with a baby is its own special kind of heart. We'll get you some rest. Like my heart grows a hundred times. This is what I need to hear from a personal agent. It's not that psychophantic, like a GPT-40 voice, but it is gentle, kind, human-first. I really do like the voice of Muse. I find myself 0% annoyed with Muse, which is a miracle. It speaks to me like a human. So it's going to say, "What's a typical first step right now?" I'm going to say, "He goes to bed between 730 and 8 and usually up between 1230 and 130. Recently, he's been wanting to party for an hour before he goes to bed. If I can get him back in his crib, he wants to be padded on the back or hold my hand. It's very sweet. I like doing it, but mom needs to sleep. Then he sleeps to like 430 or 5. Again, needs the same treatment. And then ideally, we can get him back to sleep till 7 or beyond. Sometimes the 430 or 5, my husband comes and gets him and carries him till he sleeps. Help! Okay, again, I, you know, this is a goal. And I have done this goal with open claw. I have done this goal with chat GPT. I have just liked the experience of setting personal goals with Muse a lot better. The tone is a lot gentler. The path towards the goal is nice. The fact that it's actually tracking it as a goal as opposed to a chat is really helpful. And it's telling me the two things that are going on, the 1AM party and try trimming down 30 and then it's off the second nap. Great. And the padding and hand holding are sleep associations. So what does this nap look like? I'll do this. We'll skip this in the episode. You guys don't have to listen to my full baby schedule, but let's end up with what the final goal and recommendation is. Okay, so once Muse has your goal set up, it sets up a reminder to nudge you every morning on your goal or in every night on your goal. And so I really like this. It's a combination of this new primitive, which is a personal goal with the reminders that we've come to know and love from like Rockbot or open claw or any of these agents. And it's just a really nice way to track personal things. And then the last piece I want to go to like kind of unique navigation of Muse is library. And so library or all the things that Muse has made for you basically. And what's really cool is the first time I came into the library, of course, I was expecting this artifact of the PDF that I made. I can make you documents like PDFs. It can make you websites, which I haven't tested yet, but given the front end design of the artifact, I really like, but what's really cool is it can make you images, videos, and podcasts podcasts. I did not know it could generate podcasts for you, sort of like notebook LM style podcasts. And so what I prompted this podcast to do is just make me a podcast about the AI news this weekend. And it didn't take very long to do this. And it generated this podcast and just listen to what we got. Welcome to the weekend wire. I'm Alex. And I'm Jordan. It's Sunday, September 13th, 2026. And honestly, this might be the most dramatic weekend AI has had all year. It's really a tale of two moods. On one side, the biggest labs in the world are suddenly talking about hitting the brakes. On the other, the president is saying those fears are wildly exaggerated. I was pretty impressed. It's a six minute podcast. You can actually publish it to Spotify or Apple podcasts if you want. I'm presuming you can share it with people. This was a real surprise to me and Muse that I was not expecting that I really liked. And so here's my experience with Muse. There are just these moments of delight that are surprising and nice. These design affordances that are really cool that really make it feel like the personal agent you want. You know, there's been a lot of talk about instinct, especially on the timeline. And like, I had my own kind of bad data experience with instinct. Maybe I'll try it again. I probably won't. It was nice to be able to eye message an assistant. But I'm telling you, this is what consumers want. They want beautiful things. They want trustworthy, like progressive disclosure. They want permissions to be asked for. They want these like nice affordances and UI. And this just feels more comprehensive, more complete, more consumer friendly to me. I want to talk about a couple of things that I really love in the design. So yes, of course, I said I loved identity. Second, I really love this activity feed. But if we go back to creating that podcast, let me just find it. What's really cool about the activity feed is it's not just the list of what it did for me. It is actually a list of every tool call, script, etc. Now most consumers are not going to care about this. But it's really kind of nice as a developer to see the step by step that it went through on every task. And as I was watching this progress, I was thinking, man, I really want this in codex. I want this in cloud code. I want this in rockbot. I love this lineage of the tasks that it's done for me, how it's thought, but it's just like such a nice UI. It's so delightful. It's really cool. And so I think just the design thinking is very, very strong here. And not just the fact that it will track everything it's done for you, which shows the work gives transparency. It's not just that it exposes the tasks that it's done and how it's in the tools that it's used and how it's done that work for you. But it's presented in a really easy to understand way where depending on the elevation you're comfortable with, you can really dive in. You know, the second thing is permission granting. It does a really nice job of asking for permissions, especially at the appropriate level for consumers. So you don't see down here like auto-approved. You don't see like yellow mode. You don't see it. Ask me every time. It just asks you the right time for permission. So when I connected my email, I think a rockbot would have said, I have your email. I'm going to go read it. You said, I have your email. May I go find out some information about you? And I said, yes. And then it said, this is the information I found out about you. Can I use this information, please? And I said, yes. And so it was just this like really lovely way to give trust to this agent that didn't presume that I wanted to go yellow mode, but also was not annoying. Like just was not annoying. It really wasn't. And so I really liked that experience. And then I got to tell you all my favorite part of the UI is the avatar. Now, look, it animates. It's so cute. I want to show you a couple things. One, when I ask it to do something, it gets a little laptop and it starts working. So if I say, hey, my parents are coming into town the first week of October, can you find some activities in San Francisco that they might want to do with the kid? It's like the first week in October to the second week in October. And let's see if us look. Polly's got a little fuzzy laptop that she's working on. And also, these like activity feeds are so cute. Perfect emoji. Perfect task name. Just like great design here. I really do love it. And so I think this is extremely cute, extremely cute. The other thing is editing. Editing the avatar is adorable. So if I want to change the avatar, it gives me a prompt here that says change your avatar to you. And I'm going to say instead of a red lobster, Polly, I love you. You know, you are no longer an open claw. Change your avatar to a teal adorable dragon. I want your name to be slime because that's the name of my kids favorite stuffy. And what's really fun about this, okay, again, Polly's going to work on her laptop. But it's going to generate an image here for the new avatar and look again at how adorable this is. Whenever it's doing image gen or media gen, it pulls up like an orb that it's working on. It's so cute. I love it so much. Again, when I talk to designers about operating at the top level of your craft, I do not mean rounding buttons. I do not mean making strokes. I do not mean running impeccable. What I mean is this. I mean you take a static avatar and you use image gen to animate it for an on-demand loading screen that you could have never done before. Now look, it's giving me options for who slime can be. Oh my god, he looks like this. It's so cute. So I'm going to pick this guy. And I select it again. Question and answer tools, election approval tools, so delightful. And slime is now working. This is his new look. But what's great about this new look is it is not just fixed. This is not just going to be a fixed image, although it's adorable. You will see if I say awesome slime. Can you look up when the Odyssey is playing on iMacs in daily city this week? Preferably during the day when I have a nanny. Ultimate AI use case finding iMacs tickets to the Odyssey. You will see slime should be animating soon. So look, he's moving again. This is not something that I told it to do. This is not something that I asked for. It just presumed and did it out of the box. I love it. Now this is the last thing is I have had Muse try to shop for me. I had it try to shop for new balance 90 60s because I am a basic B. I'm a basic millennial mom. I need my basic millennial mom shoes. My experience shopping was not great because it did not find the right color way. The voicemail like it didn't get the right number right. It wasn't really great. I kind of got stuck on browser. use. But what I do like about Muse is instead of exposing its full virtual machine to an end user who probably really doesn't care about that, it exposes a subset of virtual machine, which is the browser, which is the thing I care about. I think consumers would be very confused and scared to see this like weird looking computer, especially with the errors that you would see with like a rockbot or something like that. It just like doesn't give confidence. But being able to see the browser and just use the browser actually is a more accessible kind of like way to interact with the MuseBots virtual machine. So I've actually really liked that experience. Now it's browsing. We'll see if it does a good job. Again, it's looking at practical magic too, which I do want to see, but not when I asked for. This is where I found Muse due less of a good job. So you all know this. I am a Codex browser-use screen-use girl. Codex would crush this in a hot minute. For some reason, Muse just really struggles with finding the right thing on the internet to buy, which stinks because I do want it to buy things for me. Now what's weird about this is it says it's playing at iMacs this weekend. Monday, Wednesday, blah, blah, blah. Do I want it to get me tickets for one of these things? Now what's concerning and again does not engender trust. And this has been the only part. The browser use has been the only part where I did not get trust. It didn't seem to pull up the right movey. So I don't know where it's getting that information. But let's say I want to go, let's say you want to go Monday at 1215. I do want to see what it does here because what I suspect it does is it's going to like start to check out with the tickets. I'm going to say one because I'm going to one ticket because I we can't afford a babysitter. So we just have to get a movie by yourself, especially a three hour movie. I can't have a $300 babysitter slash movie date night too much. Okay, so on it is grabbing one ticket. Let's see what it does. It's going to come back with the total. And then I bet it's going to ask me for a link invite. I'm super curious how this works. Let's go to the next tab and loading the browser task. Okay, it's finding the Odyssey. It's clicking through. It's going to buy the ticket. Yep, it's going to definitely go through and just use browser use for this. And then I bet it asked for Stripe link. I can't actually go to this movie. So we're going to stop and not actually buy this ticket. But this was much more successful than my shoes, shoe shopping experience. And I think with the integration with link, we can have a really nice easy, you know, AI shopping experience with Muse that I honestly haven't tried much in Rockbot and then never did with OpenClaw. But this feels like the right agent for the job, which is this personal agent. Okay, 2099. I'm going to have to buy. It's going through Gus checkout, which I suppose is fine. I don't need to send a mark account. And then I suppose I could give it Stripe and pay for this movie. All right, it did it. Now it's asking for link by Stripe. If I connected, I could issue it a card. It could buy me these tickets and I would be on my way. Unfortunately, I actually don't have three hours to go see this movie. I will never see a movie until my children are in college. But what a nice experience. I don't have to browse. I don't have to do any of this and it did a much better job than shopping for shoes. Okay, so that is my whirlwind tour of Muse TLDR. I love it. I like it. It's great. The onboarding experiences fantastic. We've got these top tier consumer designers from Facebook and Instagram and meta in general. You can tell they put great kind of like user experience into this. I was delighted at every moment. I was never annoyed. The authorization permission method, you know, traceability, the soul. All of it was what I wanted from personal agent. Now I'm going to toss it on my phone and probably carry it around and use it. I think for personal use cases. So probably not for my chief of staff stuff. My life is just too complicated for that. But I will definitely use it for wellness tracking, kid activity stuff. I'll probably move my morning newspaper to it. It's actually the design is just too good. Shopping for sure. And then these sort of like home relative use cases, right? Like chasing the city to fix something in a house or chasing the city to fix something in the street. Signing up for a workout class. Those kinds of things I think I will use Muse for. What I think people should really pay attention to though is product managers designers. We have not had to design agents for most of our career. This is a really new thing to try to design. And I do think you just spent a lot of time with Muse figuring out what they got right because they think they got a lot right on the design here. How much they expose, how much they don't, how much they make transparent, how much they don't. And the new primitives of kind of like tasks, ideas, goals, library, the items inside a library. We're not using words like crons. We're not using words like to do. We're not using words like tools or artifacts. This is a very consumer friendly app that I think I'm going to use. One thing I don't think did particularly well is browser use. Have some failures with shopping for shoes. I don't know if the vision's quite there, but it did a pretty good job with finding tickets for the Odyssey. So a girl can't complain. That is my whirlwind tour of Muse. I like it. I think it's adorable. I'm going to install on my phone. And again, for those that are worried about beta privacy, honestly, I've been a meta Facebook whatever user for 20-ish years now. They've got my photos. They've got my mom. They've got like pictures of my kids on Instagram. They've got everything about me. So I guess the devil, you know, I also am going to try the Facebook models because I was impressed by the artifacts that were generated. And I think that's good indication that there might be really strong models on the meta side, which I haven't played with. So we'll probably do a review of models there. In the meantime, I would love for you to test Muse. I think it's really interesting. I'm curious what use cases it worked well for you, what you think of the design and what you would like to see me do next with slime the Muse bot. This has been a how I AI agent review. It was so nice to walk through this with you all and I can't wait to talk to you soon. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leading us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiipod.com. See you next time. [MUSIC]

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Muse is a personal AI agent from Meta designed specifically for consumers, especially parents, with a focus on everyday tasks like managing family schedules and shopping.
  2. It offers a secure, consumer-friendly interface with features like identity customization, a cute animated avatar, and transparent permission requests that build trust.
  3. Muse excels in personal use cases such as creating readable, beautifully designed PDF newsletters and podcasts, with strong attention to user experience and emotional tone.
  4. The agent includes unique primitives like goals, ideas, and a personal feed, enabling proactive support in areas like wellness, relationships, and daily routines.
  5. It provides detailed activity tracking and tool lineage, offering transparency and traceability that developers and users alike find valuable.
  6. While the browser-based shopping experience had flaws—especially in finding the right product—it successfully completed ticket purchases with proper payment integration.
  7. Muse’s design prioritizes accessibility and familiarity, avoiding technical jargon and exposing only necessary tools (like a browser) to prevent user confusion.
  8. Despite limitations in complex tasks like product search, Muse stands out for its elegant, human-centered design and emotional warmth, making it a compelling personal agent.

Summary:

Muse is a consumer-focused personal AI agent from Meta designed to simplify daily life, especially for parents and families. It offers a secure, intuitive interface with a customizable avatar, transparent permission workflows, and a warm, human-like tone that builds trust. The agent excels in creating visually appealing, personalized content such as family schedules, newsletters, and podcasts, with strong design affordances like activity feeds and goal tracking.

Key features like goals, ideas, and a tailored news feed provide proactive support for wellness, relationships, and personal routines. While its browser-based shopping capabilities struggled with precision—particularly in finding the right shoe colors—its ability to book movie tickets with proper payment integration shows promising functionality. Muse avoids technical complexity by exposing only essential tools, making it accessible and reassuring for non-technical users.

Despite these strengths, it still faces challenges in complex real-world tasks. Overall, Muse delivers a delightful, well-designed experience that prioritizes user trust, emotional connection, and practical daily use, making it a standout personal agent for personal and family life.

FAQs

Muse is a personal AI agent developed by Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. It's designed to help users with everyday tasks, particularly those related to parenting and family life.

Muse stands out with features like a cute, customizable avatar, a personal activity feed showing task history, goal tracking, and a consumer-friendly interface that emphasizes transparency and user control.

Muse asks for explicit permission before performing any action, such as accessing email or making purchases. It uses a secure, isolated virtual machine and clearly explains what it’s doing, ensuring users remain in control and feel safe.

Yes, Muse can generate PDFs, images, videos, and podcasts. For example, it created a podcast about AI news and a printable weekly family newsletter with schedules and local news.

Muse excels in parenting-related tasks like managing child schedules, creating family newsletters, setting up routines, and organizing family activities or events.

Yes, Muse struggles with complex online shopping tasks, such as finding the right shoe color or navigating product pages, though it performs better in booking tickets and generating content.

Chat with AI

Loading...

Pro features

Go deeper with this episode

Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.