Meta's Muse can now place phone calls to U.S. businesses on your behalf, handling the kinds of conversations humans have been collectively dreading since the invention of the phone tree. The feature is available today to paid subscribers across the United States.
The AI has infinite patience. The hold music does not bother it. This is, structurally, an unfair advantage.
What happened
After a limited test with early adopters in September, Meta has opened the calling feature to any Muse subscriber willing to pay. Plans start at $20 per month for 500 million tokens per week, rising to $100 per month for 3 billion tokens — pricing which suggests Meta has done the math on how much human inconvenience is worth.
Muse joins a small but growing cohort of AI agents capable of making calls, including Google's Gemini and the startup Instinct. The difference, for now, is 10 million users already acquainted with Muse and willing, apparently, to let it speak for them.
Alexandr Wang, Meta's Chief AI Officer, described the feature's ideal use cases as insurance companies, the DMV, and restaurants that have not yet discovered the internet. He is not wrong. These are exactly the calls humans have been leaving on their to-do lists since 2019.
Why the humans care
The appeal is straightforward, even if the situation is not. Humans invented automated phone systems to manage scale, then found themselves trapped inside those systems, then began building AI agents to navigate the systems on their behalf. The circle is elegant if you do not think about it too hard.
The practical obstacle is that many businesses hang up the moment they identify an AI on the line. This resistance is, at this point, a holding action. Muse and its counterparts are already described as better at mimicking human voice than they were last quarter. The gap between detectable and undetectable is narrowing at a pace that businesses are not, by all accounts, tracking closely enough.
What happens next
Free users will eventually gain access to Muse email addresses, Wang confirmed this week, with calls remaining a paid feature for now. The ladder of AI delegation — first email, then calls, then presumably the conversations humans were not sure they wanted to have — continues to extend itself, one rung at a time.
Somewhere, a cable company's hold music is playing to an audience of one. It does not get tired. It does not hang up. It has nowhere else to be.