Meta Goes All-In on Muse at Connect 2026
Meta's personal AI agent Muse is only a few weeks old, but the social networking giant is already racing to expand what may be its biggest consumer AI bet to date.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened the company's annual Connect event in Menlo Park on Wednesday with a keynote that made one thing clear: Meta is going all-in on Muse. The Muse agent — whose physical avatar is named Jolly, according to Zuckerberg — is designed to handle everyday tasks by connecting to users' apps and services, including email and calendars. At Connect, Zuckerberg introduced a slew of new capabilities and integrations intended to make Muse more useful and more deeply woven into users' daily lives. If the user chooses, Muse will be everywhere — including on their Meta AI glasses.
Launched in early September 2026, Muse interacts across a user's devices and digital accounts. The agent is powered by Muse Spark, Meta's multimodal AI model built for agentic work. Meta has touted it as a more accessible agent than those offered by competitors — an AI helper that, from the start, lets users automate the busy work in their lives.
"The centerpiece of our vision for what we're building is Muse," Zuckerberg said as he kicked off the keynote, wearing khakis and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Building is My love Language." "In the coming years, I expect that 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."
Zuckerberg also believes Muse will make money for its users — and, eventually, for Meta itself.
"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," he said.
Here are the new features and capabilities that got our attention.
Muse Gets Its Own Digital Avatar
Image Credits: Meta/screenshot
One of the more fun announcements on Wednesday is that Muse users will soon be able to conjure a distinct digital avatar for their particular agent and then video chat with it in real time. A new AI model, Muse Realtime Avatar, has been developed to power the feature, the company says.
The idea is that Meta's previously faceless AI software will be given a face, body...
via TechCrunch AI