Muse Gets a Voice, an Inbox, and a Business Model at Meta Connect
Video chat, a personal email address, five new retail partners, and Zuckerberg's clearest answer yet on how Meta plans to make money from its AI agent.
3 min readMeta used its Connect keynote Wednesday to turn Muse from a chat-and-shop assistant into something closer to a full personal agent — adding live video conversations, a dedicated email address, retail partners, and, for the first time, a clear answer on how the company plans to make money from it.
Muse can now see you, hear you, and email for you
The headline product upgrades are video chat and email. Users will soon be able to hold live video conversations with a customizable Muse avatar, powered by a new Muse Realtime Avatar model that controls the avatar's movements while users adjust its appearance and voice. Separately, every Muse agent now gets its own dedicated email address, letting it complete tasks and communicate with users (and, presumably, third parties) without routing everything through the app. Meta also said the Muse Mac app will gain computer-use capabilities, letting the agent operate a user's computer directly — and confirmed Muse is coming to Meta's smart glasses in the coming months, without a more specific timeline.
Retail roster grows — minus one obvious name
Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, and Wayfair joined Muse's retail-partner roster, giving the agent a meaningfully broader set of stores it can shop and transact through on a user's behalf. The list is notable as much for who's missing: Amazon has continued to decline participation, a holdout that fits the pattern reported earlier this week of Amazon asking Meta to remove it from Muse after blocking the agent from making purchases on its own site.
The business model, finally spelled out
Mark Zuckerberg said Muse will remain free for a large number of tokens, with Meta expecting to collect small fees on transactions over time as usage scales — effectively a take-rate model similar to how payment processors or marketplaces monetize, rather than a subscription. It's the clearest signal yet of how Meta intends to turn Muse's rapid early adoption into revenue, and it lines up with this week's other Muse-adjacent stories: the partnerships with PayPal and Shopify for agentic checkout, and the sector-rotation selling in businesses that rely on customer switching friction — friction a transaction-fee-funded shopping agent is specifically designed to remove.
This platform, including MarketCatalyst LLC, is not a registered investment advisor and doesn't manage client assets. Content here is for informational and educational purposes only — not investment advice, and not a stock-picking or trade-alert service. Trading stocks and options carries risk, including possible loss of principal. Consider your own goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance, and consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
This article may have been generated with the help of AI. Readers are advised to independently verify all figures and conduct their own due diligence before making any investment decisions.