Meta's Muse AI agent can now phone businesses on your behalf, but only for people with a paid subscription.
The calls cover three jobs: scheduling appointments, making reservations and waiting on hold. That last one is the least glamorous and arguably the most useful, since it covers the stretch of a call where nothing happens and a person would otherwise have to listen.
The idea itself is not new. Google demonstrated Duplex in 2018, an assistant that phoned restaurants and salons to book tables and appointments. What differs here is the framing. Muse is an agent, meaning software that carries out tasks for you rather than only answering questions, and the phone call is one more action it can take.
Phone calls make a revealing test for that kind of software. A business that takes bookings by voice has no app or API (a standard way for programs to talk to each other) to plug into, so the agent has to deal with a receptionist or a phone menu the way a person would. That is a harder setting than most chatbot demos.
The subscription requirement narrows the audience to paying users, which makes this a perk rather than a default feature. Duplex showed in 2018 that a machine could place the call. The open question is whether people will pay for one to sit through the hold music.