Meta is rebuilding its two-week-old Muse agent into a video-calling avatar, an email correspondent, and a Mac desktop operator, the company announced at Meta Connect 2026 on September 23, 2026. Muse launched earlier this month and, according to reporting on its early performance, was downloaded more times than ChatGPT on mobile during its first 12 days while topping the App Store charts. Meta is moving fast to convert that opening into product surface area before the novelty fades.
The headline addition is live video. Users could already customize how their Muse avatar looks; now they will be able to tweak how it sounds and hold real-time video conversations with it, powered by a new Muse Realtime Avatar model that drives facial and body motion. That shifts Muse from a text chatbot with a face into something closer to a synthetic person on a call.
Muse agents are also getting their own email addresses. Owners can send tasks to their agent by email and receive replies at that same address, giving Muse a persistent identity outside the Meta app and a channel that plugs into every workflow email already touches — calendars, receipts, confirmations, group threads.
Key facts
- 01Muse launched earlier this month and outpaced ChatGPT downloads on mobile during its first 12 days, topping the App Store charts.
- 02Meta announced video-call avatars, dedicated agent email addresses, and Mac computer-use capabilities at Meta Connect 2026 on September 23, 2026.
- 03A new Muse Realtime Avatar model will drive how the on-screen avatar moves during live video conversations.
- 04Meta plans to bring Muse to its smart glasses in the coming months, extending the agent to what wearers see.
The recently launched Muse Mac app is picking up computer use, the same class of capability that Anthropic and OpenAI have been shipping over the past year. That lets the agent click, type, and navigate a user's desktop rather than only responding inside a chat window, and it is the feature most likely to convert Muse from a curiosity into a daily driver for anyone who lives in a browser.
Meta says Muse is coming to its smart glasses in the coming months, letting wearers talk to the agent about whatever is in front of them. That extends the pattern Meta signaled earlier this month when it brought Muse to a camera-free Ray-Ban model, which we covered at the time. Glasses give Muse a persistent input channel — vision plus voice — that neither ChatGPT nor Claude has at hardware scale.
The bundle of updates is unusually aggressive for a product this new. Most AI agents ship with a chat interface and add capabilities over quarters, not weeks. Meta is compressing that cycle, likely because early download momentum is fragile and the company has watched consumer AI apps spike and fade before.
It also positions Muse as a general-purpose agent rather than a Meta-app feature. Email, video, desktop control, and glasses input together describe an assistant that lives across surfaces, not one that lives inside Instagram or WhatsApp. That is a strategic pivot for a company whose AI story until recently was mostly about Llama as an open-weights model family and Meta AI as an in-app chatbot.
The risks are the usual ones for agent products shipped at speed. Video avatars introduce uncanny-valley problems, dedicated email addresses create phishing and impersonation surface area, and desktop computer use has a documented history of misclicks and prompt-injection vulnerabilities across every vendor that has tried it. Meta has not published safety documentation for the new capabilities or said how it will handle agent-to-agent email traffic, which will become a live problem the moment two Muse agents email each other on behalf of their owners.
For Meta, Muse's early numbers are the first consumer AI win the company has had that doesn't depend on embedding a chatbot inside an app people already use for something else. Turning that into durable engagement is the harder problem, and shipping video calls, email, computer use, and glasses integration inside a single month is Meta's answer to it. Whether the product holds its App Store position past the launch window will decide whether Muse is a real second front against OpenAI or a spike on a chart.
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