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

Claire Vo (0:00)

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, Meta's new personal agent. We're gonna talk about what Muse is, what I had it 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 the story behind it all. Here are the confessions for marketers who have 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 for Muse. This is for me. This is for millennials with kids, maybe GenX 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 100% 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.

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 of things that make Muse different than other agents. First of all, why is it the same as other agents? Well, it is an 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 not what my mom is going to care about. This is clearly not what the middle-of-the-road consumer is going to care about. I, as 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. Again, 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 feature, 1Password integration, and then 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, just going to 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. 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 how they designed Muse and how they built Saif Dinti 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 it 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 Claire. 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 up front 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. Right off the bat, I was asked, what do you want to name your agent? Of course, I named my agent Polly. Up in the top right, it used to be this little Yeti style animated fuzzy guy. 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 OpenClaw, recently replaced by Grok Bot, but to be replaced by Muse. I think my personal agent Polly is going to be a Muse bot.