Meta unveils Muse Charm pendant to push its AI agent beyond the phone

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg used the company's annual Connect conference on Wednesday to reveal a handheld device called Muse Charm, designed to work with Meta's recently launched Muse AI personal agent, CNBC reports. People will be able to speak to the gadget to interact with their Meta AI agent without having to unlock a phone or open an app, Zuckerberg said.

Muse is an AI agent, an assistant that does not just answer questions but takes actions on the user's behalf: it can respond to emails, book travel and shop, according to CNBC. The app has climbed to the top of Apple's App Store, eclipsing ChatGPT, and Zuckerberg wants to make it the centerpiece of Meta's AI strategy.

What Meta showed

Zuckerberg shared few details about what Muse Charm can do and gave no price, CNBC reports. Meta still needs to finalise the finishing material and lay out the components, he said, with the goal of shipping in time for the holidays in December. If you're not wearing glasses, this is going to be by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse and to show it what's going on around you, he said. The device will contain a fingerprint sensor that, when activated, lets people talk to their agent.

• Muse Charm: a pendant for talking to the Muse agent, with a fingerprint sensor; price not announced; planned for December.
• Meta VR Glasses: slimmer and lighter than the Quest headsets, powered by an external puck with a Qualcomm processor and battery; 1,299 dollars, on sale in spring 2027.
• Smart glasses: Muse will come to Meta's glasses in the coming months, activated by saying the agent's name; Meta says there will be over 100 styles of AI glasses by the end of 2026.
• Business model: Meta plans to take a small fee on transactions completed through Muse.

The Meta VR Glasses are the company's first virtual reality device since the 299-dollar Quest 3S in 2024; they track eyes and hands to reduce the need for controllers, CNBC adds. Meta's smart glasses business rests on a partnership with Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica.

Why Meta wants its own hardware

The pendant is Zuckerberg's latest attempt to end Meta's reliance on Apple for distribution, a sore point since Apple changed its privacy policy in 2021 and limited app developers' ability to target users with ads, CNBC explains. Meta also got its device out a week before OpenAI's DevDay conference, where OpenAI may show its long-awaited hardware, reportedly a speaker shaped like a hockey puck.

Investors rewarded the momentum: Meta shares rose 4.5 per cent on Thursday and more than 25 per cent since Muse was announced earlier this month, according to CNBC. Analysts at Mizuho wrote that Connect attached Muse as a killer app fused deeply into the hardware strategy.

An object on trend, a demand still unproven

The device resembles a cross between a Tamagotchi keychain and a wearable medical buzzer, CNBC writes. TechCrunch sees a fashion logic: Gen Z already carries bag charms, a market one analyst firm expects to exceed 1 billion dollars by 2030, and young people have started wearing old Apple Watches as keychains. Muse lets users design their own avatar, which makes the agent an expression of personality. Reactions are mixed, TechCrunch notes, recalling AI gadgets that failed, such as the Ai Pin, Rabbit and the Friend pendant.

Many experts see no clear demand given how capable smartphones are, CNBC reports. Why would I carry another device? asked Anthony Ferry, chief executive of e-commerce company Wayvia; if he still has to pull out his phone to finish an order, it's just another thing to charge. Anshika Jain, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, sees use cases such as asking questions, getting reminders and planning on the go. TechCrunch adds that Meta's record on privacy, including settlements and charges from the US Federal Trade Commission, could weigh on trust.

The question of who pays

Zuckerberg said he expects that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions, while keeping Muse free for most users, which William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart called a clear monetisation framework, CNBC reports. That model depends on merchants. Amazon has blocked Muse from scanning its site to shop for customers, as it did with Perplexity, OpenAI and Google. Companies need to look at whether this is actually growing their business, Ferry said: if the same customer buys the same product through another channel, that isn't automatically a new sale.

What this changes for companies

For US retailers and service businesses, Muse Charm is a signal that AI agents are becoming a sales channel with its own gatekeeper and its own commission. Before accepting orders placed by Meta's agent, merchants should measure whether those orders are new customers or existing ones arriving by a costlier route, and decide, as Amazon did, whether they want agents shopping on their sites at all.