Meta released its Muse personal agent as a dedicated iPad app on Oct. 7, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported. Muse launched on iPhone and Android on Sept. 8, so the iPad version followed about a month later.
Muse has passed 6.6 million installs since launch, according to estimates from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower cited by TechCrunch. Meta hasn’t released its own install figure. David Singleton, a vice president of engineering at Meta Superintelligence Labs, told CNBC that Muse has millions of U.S. users and is “growing rapidly.”
Users connect their accounts so Muse can keep track of email and meetings, along with bills. It can also book reservations, order groceries, set goals and make purchases, TechCrunch reported.
New connectors
Each outside service appears in Muse as a “connector,” and users choose which ones to sign in to based on how much of their online life they want an agent to handle. With the iPad release, Meta added connectors aimed at small businesses, including Asana, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, GitHub and Zoom, TechCrunch reported. It also added Notion and Granola, along with connectors for Meta ad accounts.
Meta has also announced retail partners, including Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart and Wayfair, that let Muse shop and complete transactions on their sites, according to TechCrunch.
Getting past the bot blockers
Shopping through retailers’ sites can still fail when websites mistake an agent for a bot and block it, TechCrunch noted. Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta’s agents, citing concerns about scraping, CNBC reported.
On Oct. 6, Meta and Sierra, the enterprise AI startup co-founded by Bret Taylor, announced the Personal Agent Protocol. It’s an open standard for how personal agents work with businesses. In a blog post, Taylor and Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor named Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart as partners.
Under the protocol, an agent starts a session on its user’s behalf, first as a guest and then signed in if a task needs account access, according to Sierra. The customer decides whether the agent gets read-only or write access.
Sessions use OAuth, an established standard for granting access without sharing passwords. Each company decides which routes to open. An agent might use its regular website or connect through its APIs, and a task like a warranty claim might go to the company’s own agent.
“It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists,” Taylor, who is also OpenAI’s chairman, told CNBC. He compared it to signing in to websites with Google or Facebook credentials.
Singleton told CNBC that people use Muse for tasks like “signing their kids up for classes” and booking dentist appointments. “We need a mechanism to have it go faster and smoother,” he said.
OpenAI and Anthropic hadn’t joined the effort, CNBC reported, though Taylor said he expects them to. Sierra said it plans to publish a first draft of the specification and a reference implementation.
Source: TechCrunch, “Meta's Muse launches on iPad just a month after its mobile debut”
Additional sources: CNBC, “Meta joins companies to tame 'chaos' of doing business with AI bots”; Sierra, Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, “Introducing Personal Agent Protocol”
