Muse review: The personal AI agent that gets consumer UX right

0:00It's the weekend, the kids are out of the house, and that means one thing, it's time to test a new AI agent. Today, I'm going to give you my first past opinion about Muse, Meta's new personal agent. We're going to talk about what Muse is, what I had to do for me and what it didn't do quite well, and why I think it might be my favorite designed agent I played with in a long time. Let's get to it. Optimizely agent platform for marketers is built on a bigger idea, a whole directory of agents now joined by a newly revealed squad of virtual teammates, each with a defined role and a personality of their own.

0:39This isn't about faster drafts, it's about handling the coordination too. The research, the approvals, the handoffs, the routing, the back and forth that quietly eats your week and never makes it into anyone's highlight reel. Get the story behind it all. Hear the confessions from marketers who have handed off the busy work. Meet the squad, and understand what virtual teammates can do for you at optimizely.com slash how I AI. First, before I get into what I loved about Muse, let's talk about what Muse is. So Muse is from Meta. Yes, Instagram, Facebook, Meta, that Meta. And they're positioning it as your personal AI agent that gets things done.

1:22Don't we all want this? Now, let me tell you what I can for sure verify having looked at the landing page for Muse. This is for me. This is for millennials with kids, maybe Gen X with kids. This is for the olds. So if you are a young person, I'm sure you can find many use cases for Muse. It's actually pretty great. But if you look at what they're targeting in terms of use cases and ideas, it is 100 % for parents. You see here, they are going to highlight things like filling out permission slips, shopping for strollers, all those sorts of things. So this is going to be a AI that is really well targeted.

2:06And spoiler alert, I actually really like it. I'm going to go through why I really like it and what I would use it for and where it surprised me in a really delightful way. Now, I want to call it a couple things that make Muse the same as other agents and a couple things that make Muse different than other agents. First of all, why is it the same as other agents? Well, it is a agent that has a computer. Everything is computer. The first thing they put on this landing page is it has a dedicated secure computer with its own browser. What I think is so funny is everything on this landing page for Muse is very consumer friendly, except for this one paragraph that says Muse secure VMs run on a persistent isolated Linux virtual machine equipped with full browser and enough storage CPU and memory to do the kinds of things you do on your own computer.

2:52That is clearly like not what my mom is going to care about. This is clearly not what the like middle of the road consumer is going to care about. I as an early adopter who was probably the target audience for Muse cares about this, but I don't think anybody else does. The other thing is Muse has desktop and mobile. You can also communicate with it through WhatsApp. So again, And like ease of communication, using the meta ecosystem, really useful. It really has good controls. And so this is something that I've observed through this entire onboarding and my initial experience with Muse is it's very good at asking for permission, telling you what it's going to do and moving through that process nicely.

3:34Again, they're reinforcing security credentials. It can store credentials. It's calling out a feature 1Password integration. And then like all of these agents that people want to have shop for you, Stripe's link as a payment method and payment protections, the first for AI agents is highlighted front and center. Finally, you know, just going to like the consumer friendliness of this, they don't call it plugins. They don't call it connectors. They say apps. You can connect your apps and you can see the first ones here. The ones listed here are very consumer friendly. Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, Health, Shopify, all those sorts of things.

4:10So again, this is going to be a really consumer oriented, not a work focused agent, but that's kind of why I love it. And then again, they put a lot of content together about why how they design Muse and how they built Sleafed into Muse. I will just shout out preemptively to the meta team. It's designed really well. I actually really love this agent. I think it's delightful. so we're going to go through my experience setting up this agent a couple things that I had to do and why I think you might use Muse as your personal agent okay what does Muse benefit from well benefits from the fact that when I went to the Muse landing page it had my Facebook account already signed in and I just had to click one button to sign as a in as Claire the first screen they show you is just this few things to know and again this is kind of like the meta commentary on this product, they really want you to feel safe.

5:01They want you to feel confident and they want to engender trust. So it tells you upfront what Muse can do for you and why it's great for you. It can take actions. It can work around the clock, but you are in control. Once you get started, you get to dive right in with your new spot. Now there's a couple of things I really love about Muse. But the first thing is it lets you pick an identity. I love an identity. I want my agents to be cute and named. So right off the bat, I was asked, what do you want to name your agent? And of course, I named my agent Polly. Up in the top right, it used to be this little like Yeti style animated fuzzy guy.

5:47And I will show you the process by which we updated the avatar. heart. It's really cute. We'll give Polly a little makeover. But I named her Polly. And why did I name her Polly? Polly is my beloved original open claw, recently replaced by GrokBot, but to be replaced by Muse. I think my personal agent Polly is going to be a MuseBot. Now, a couple things you're going to notice when you're logged in to Muse. This is open claw E. It's got open claw tells to it. what does it have that I really love from OpenClaw? Well, over here in Identity, it actually has an Identity MD, a Soul MD, and a Memory. And you know what?

6:32I love you, GrokBot, but I want to craft your soul. And so the fact that I can click in here and open Soul MD and edit it, again, if you read the Soul MD and you've ever looked at the OpenClaw kind of out-of-the-box soul md this is very familiar it looks a lot like open claw um but i do love the fact that you can actually manually edit the identity and memory and make these changes now i've used this for a couple hours and it hasn't actually updated the identity or soul that much so i'm curious how integrated this like updates are or does it do it overnight like open claw sometimes did we'll see um but it's kind of interesting there's a couple other primitives of muse that I think are fascinating that we're going to go through first is this activity feed so it will actually trace for you every task that it's done for you over time and I love this feature if you are an agent designer pay attention because this lineage and this history of what it's done for me over time is really nice.

7:42I can go back, I can understand what it's worked on. And so we're going to go into the design of this particular feature a little bit later in the episode. But I really, really do like this. I mean, the other thing is, is it will list all the approvals that you've given it. So if you have to explicitly approve an action, it has that there. Again, like most tasks, it has its heartbeat. We got a little bit of open claw. What's it doing in its heartbeat? I don't know, but we're going to find out. So it has its heartbeat and then it has a couple tasks. Again, very user friendly. We will go through the items on the left, which again are very interesting, but I want to get into just the first chat I did with Polly.

8:24So past naming Polly, I, you know, asked it for one thing. I said, I need to stay on top of my kid's schedule. They have so much going on. My middle kid quit soccer, like help. and it went through this very very nice onboarding experience for me it asked me for a google calendar I connected it was super easy not scary then it asked for my kids names which we won't show you and then it said you know are you ready to delete soccer practice since your middle kid quit soccer and I said yep go for it and it did it super easily it asked for permission it left the right things that first experience was so nice it was really easy to go through and it just set me up on a good foundation to feel like yes this agent could be really useful for me then it said hey do you want me to pull an agenda together and this is where we get into some to testing some of the capabilities of news against these other agents so I said yes and I asked can need to make it really easy to read.

9:27And my hope was it was going to make an artifact because apparently Muse can make artifacts, HTML, PDF, etc. So I was hoping like maybe I could encamp it into making some like cool agenda. It did not do that. It gave me a bullet point list of things. But then I decided that I would ask it for the Tradbot favorite feature, which is the morning newsletter brief. This is the thing that I think is so cool. Every morning we print out a morning brief with the schedule for the kids, what the kids need to know, what we need to know, and then news for the day. And so I prompted it. I said, what I really want is a PDF agenda for tomorrow morning, kind of like a newsletter, one page style that I can print out and put on the kitchen table.

10:11I wanted to have not only our schedule for a week, but highlights of each kid's call outs for the parents. You might need some information from my email about what's going on. And then recent news, recent events, things in San Francisco, the weather. We can make this kind of a fun read for the whole family that we can talk about not just the logistics, but also things that are going around in the world in our city and our lives. And I, y 'all, I really like this. So it did have me connect my email address. Then it ingested some things that it knows about me and my family from my email. And again, this was a really nice experience.

10:44It found out my kids' names. It found out my husband's name. It found the kids' activities, like they do jujitsu and basketball and piano and all this kind of stuff. It inferred that we're civically engaged in San Francisco and inferred that we work in tech, that we care about tech and AI, that we'd like to do personal projects. And then it says like you do a lot of like food delivery and shopping, which is correct. And I said, yep, that sounds like us. Please build this, this PDF newsletter. So it started to work on it. And it gave me this beautiful thing. And I just cannot tell you, for those that are not watching, we have been making these since OpenClaw came out.

11:27This is an idea that my husband had and we have been printing these out. And this is the first one that has been one shot in a design I actually like. So this has made me want to test some of the Facebook models because I have hated the front end design of a lot of these PDFs out of Claude and out of Codex. They've just been like kind of boring. And this is so easy to read, so beautifully laid out. And, you know, it has a couple of sections that has a beautiful agenda for the week ahead. It has three call outs for each of the kids. It actually does call out. I didn't have to ask it to where like Brazilian jujitsu slams up against piano class.

12:06If you're a parent, you really appreciate that. And then I really love this news to know section because it has news that's local, relevant, and kid appropriate and encourages us to have these conversations at the kitchen table. And so I said, hey, I want news locally. It gave us news about safer e-bike rules, that there's a new telescope observation in the Tarantula Nebula, and that the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues. And then it has great questions. Talk at the table. If you could volunteer for one school event, what job would you pick? What would you name a brand new star forming nebula?

12:42The best fun things that we can have conversations with our kid. And then for San Francisco, I love it. It calls out that the Autumn Moon Festival is this weekend, is this upcoming weekend. And that's happening around town. So a couple of things I loved about this. The content, great. The design, beautiful. It's actually better than the one that GrokBot or OpenClaw does. And again, this is like for family agents, for personal agents. I don't want agents that get me on my computer. I don't want agents where my face is in the phone. I want agents that get me with my family into my life in an offline way.

13:16And I think it just did this really lovely job. This episode is brought to you by OpenArt, where you can manage your entire creative workflow from idea to final output with top models for images, video, and music. I create a lot of assets with AI. The problem is figuring out prompts, models, and settings before you can make anything good. OpenArt's new chat mode changes that. Chat with it like you would with ChatGPT. Whether you're creating an ad, a short film, or a promo video, start with a rough idea and it can develop the concept and script with you. Chat mode chooses the right models and settings based on what you describe, or you can specify exactly what you want.

14:01You can create multiple images and videos and handle entire creative workflows through simple chat. Then keep iterating by simply typing what you want changed. Whether you know AI or not, you only need an idea. If you can say it, OpenArt can create it. Learn more at openart.ai. That's O-P-E-N-A-R-T dot A-I. So since we're on kind of like daily newspaper, daily feed, I do want to call out some other kind of components of the Muse experience. So in addition to the main chat, you do have this feed. And this feed is basically a personalized news and information feed for you. And all I had to do is actually write this prompt and click set.

14:55It says, make me a feed about my interests. Keep the tone clear and direct. ensure it is quick to skim avoid clickbait that's it that was pre-populated i click go and now this today it has already pushed me two news items one um totally targeted at me as somebody who is sleep training poorly her baby that says sleep quality is more important than screen time limits for school success so sleep is the number one thing for success this is really super targeted to me. And then the second thing, which again is targeted because later I will show you the goal I set up, is salt in drinking water is linked to higher blood pressure.

15:34I mean, you should know this. This is pretty obvious. I do like to put a sprinkle of salt in my water because I have been electrolyte pilled. But this little feed is nice. It's much healthier, I will tell you. Muse, engineers, and much healthier than my Facebook feed, which is truly nightmare fuel. so I do like the idea of building my own personal feed I'm curious if this will pull in from Instagram or from Facebook I'm just unsure I haven't seen it yet but that's really interesting so feed is one really unique part of Muse the other really unique part of Muse is ideas so instead of you having to come up with a blank slate or name an agent and give it a job which is what I do with open cloths what I do with grokbot Muse just comes out of the box with slash ideas and ideas has great ideas for what it can help you do.

16:24Every you know, it said that I'm civically engaged. So it's like if there's a pothole or busted streetlight, I can try to get it fixed. It has obviously the productivity things like managing your inbox, managing returns, but also has awesome things like relationships where it can host a trivia night for you, or set up a dinner with a friend that you haven't spent time with in a long time. I think this is going to be a killer app for health and fitness. I think we're going to see a lot of wellness muses. That's probably what I'm going to use it for. But I think that is really amazing. Personal financial management and shopping, as well as a bunch of other ideas.

17:00And if we look at the design here, so beautiful, so cute, so delightful, out of the box, just really love how they're presenting these ideas that you can then kick off. The other primitive that I love is goals. So it will track your goals. And again, it's not a to do list. It's not like this like developer-y task list. It is like, what are your personal goals? And they help you create these goals from health, relationships, finance, career, interest, productivity, something else. So it's tracking two very important goals that I set up prior to recording this. One is drinking enough water every day.

17:42One is I'm buying shoes and I want them on sale. But I want to show you what it's like to set up a goal and how nice of an experience it is to do this and why I think goals is going to be one of these like great unlocks for personal use cases and something genius that I think the Muse team did. So we're going to make a something else goal. And we're going to say, let's do this. This is danger, danger zone. And then we're going to go all the way down and we're going to say I want to start a goal about sleep training my eight and a half month old. Gently we are room sharing because our house is small but mom has to get some sleep please.

18:28Okay so let's see what it does here. With my water goal it was very kind to me. It gave me one step that I needed to do. Let's see what it does when I have a goal to get my beloved darling child to sleep a little bit through the night, not even through the night, just sleep a little bit. So it's thinking and then what it's going to do is it's going to propose a plan to me and then say, I'm going to track that goal for you. And I'm going to do reminders for you of this goal. And it just is a really nice experience. And my reflection on Muse overall using it is that this is just a really well-designed personal agent.

19:06It's not that it's the most intelligent. It's not that it has the most powerful. It is just so well-designed. So my goal is gentle sleep training. The baby is eight and a half months old, and we room share in a small house. Claire is running on very little sleep. It's true, and I want a gentle plan. And it's saying sleep deprivation with a baby is its own special kind of heart. we'll get you some rest. Like my heart grows a hundred times. This is what I need to hear from a personal agent. It's not that sycophantic, like a GPT-4-0 voice, but it is gentle, kind, human first. I really do like the voice of Muse.

19:46I find myself 0 % annoyed with Muse, which is a miracle. It speaks to me like a human. So it's going to say, what's a typical first step right now. I'm going to say he goes to bed between 730 and 8 and usually wakes up between 1230 and 130. Recently, he's been wanting to party for an hour before he goes to bed. If I can get him back in his crib, he wants to be patted on the back or hold my hand. It's very sweet. I like doing it, but mom needs to sleep. Then he sleeps till like 430 or 5. Again, needs the same treatment. And then ideally we can get him back to sleep till seven or beyond. Sometimes at 4.30 or 5, my husband comes and gets him and carries him till he sleeps.

20:30Help! Okay, again, I, you know, this is a goal, and I have done this goal with Open Claw. I have done this goal with ChatGPT. I have just liked the experience of setting personal goals with Muse a lot better. The tone is a lot gentler. the path towards the goal is nice. The fact that it's actually tracking it as a goal as opposed to a chat is really helpful. And it's telling me the two things that are going on the 1am party and try trimming down 30 minutes off the second nap. Great. And the padding and handholding are sleep associations. So what does this nap look like? I'll do this. We'll skip this in the episode.

21:11You guys don't have to listen to my full baby schedule, but let's end up with what the final goal and recommendation is. Okay, so once Muse has your goal set up, it sets up a reminder to nudge you every morning on your goal or every night on your goal. And so I really like this. It's a combination of this new primitive, which is a personal goal with the reminders that we've come to know and love from like GrokBot or OpenClaw or any of these agents. And it's just a really nice way to track personal things. And then the last piece I want to go to like kind of unique navigation of Muse is library.

21:45And so library are all the things that Muse has made for you, basically. And what's really cool is the first time I came into the library, of course, I was expecting this artifact of the PDF that I made. I can make you documents like PDFs. It can make you websites, which I haven't tested yet. But given the front end design of the artifact, I really like. But what's really cool is it can make you images, videos, and podcasts. Podcasts. I did not know it could generate podcasts for you, sort of like Notebook LM style podcasts. And so what I prompted this podcast to do is just make me a podcast about the AI news this weekend.

22:23And it didn't take very long to do this. And it generated this podcast and just listen to what we got. Welcome to The Weekend Wire. I'm Alex. And I'm Jordan. It's Sunday, September 13th, 2026. And honestly, this might be the most dramatic weekend AI has had all year. It's really a tale of two moods. On one side, the biggest labs in the world are suddenly talking about hitting the brakes. On the other, the president is saying those fears are wildly exaggerated. I was pretty impressed. It's a six minute podcast. You can actually publish it to Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you want. I'm presuming you can share it with people.

23:03This was a real surprise to me and Muse that I was not expecting that I really liked. And so here's my experience with Muse. There are just these moments of delight that are surprising and nice. These design affordances that are really cool that really make it feel like the personal agent you want. You know, there's been a lot of talk about instinct, especially on the timeline. And like I had my own kind of bad data experience with instinct. Maybe I'll try it again. I probably won't. It was nice to be able to iMessage an assistant, but I'm telling you this is what consumers want. They want beautiful things.

23:40They want trustworthy, like progressive disclosure. They want permissions to be asked for. They want these like nice affordances and UI. And this just feels more comprehensive, more complete, more consumer friendly to me. I want to talk about a couple things that I really love in the design. So yes, of course, I said I loved identity. Second, I really love this activity feed. But if we go back to creating that podcast, let me just find it. What's really cool about the activity feed is it's not just the list of what it did for me. It is actually a list of every tool call, script, etc. Now, most consumers are not going to care about this.

24:24But it's really kind of nice as a developer to see the step by step that it went through on every task. And as I was watching this progress, I was thinking, man, I really want this in Codex. I want this in Cloud Code. I want this in GrokBot. I love this lineage of the tasks that it's done for me, how it's thought, but it's in just like such a nice UI. It's so delightful. It's really cool. And so I think just the design thinking is very, very strong here. And not just the fact that it will track everything it's done for you, which shows the work gives transparency. It's not just that it exposes the tasks that it's done and how it's in the tools that it's used and how it's done that work for you.

25:12But it's presented in a really easy to understand way where depending on the elevation you're comfortable with, you can really dive in. you know the second thing is permission granting it does a really nice job of asking for permissions especially at the appropriate level for consumers so you don't see down here like auto approve you don't see like yolo mode you don't see ask me every time it just asks you the right time for permission so when i connected my email i think a grok bot would have said i have your email i'm gonna go read it muse said i have your email may i go find out some information about you and i said yes.

25:48And then it said, this is the information I found out about you. Can I use this information, please? And I said yes. And so it was just this like really lovely way to give trust to this agent that didn't presume that I wanted to go YOLO mode, but also was not annoying, like just was not annoying. It really wasn't. And so I really liked that experience. And then I got to tell you all my favorite part of the UI is the avatar. Now, look, it animates. It's so cute. I want to show you a couple things. One, when I ask it to do something, it gets a little laptop and it starts working. So if I say, hey, my parents are coming into town the first week of October.

26:39Can you find some activities in San Francisco that they might want to do with the kid. It's like the first week in October to the second week in October. And let's see if us look Polly's got a little fuzzy laptop that she's working on. And also these like activity feeds are so cute. Perfect emoji, perfect task name, just like great design here. I really do love it. And so I think this is extremely cute extremely cute the other thing is editing editing the avatar is adorable so if I want to change the avatar it gives me a prompt here that says change your avatar to you and I'm going to say instead of a red lobster Polly I love you you know you are are no longer an open claw change your avatar to a teal adorable dragon I want your name to be slime because that's the name of my kid's favorite stuffy.

27:38And what's really fun about this, okay, again, Polly's going to work on her laptop, but it's going to generate an image here for the new avatar. And look again at how adorable this is. Whenever it's doing image gen or media gen, it pulls up like an orb that it's working on. It's so cute. I love it so much. Again, when I talk to designers about operating at the top level of your craft. I do not mean rounding buttons. I do not mean making strokes. I do not mean running impeccable. What I mean is this. I mean, you take a static avatar and you use image gen to animate it for an on demand loading screen that you could have never done before.

28:24Now, look, it's giving me options for who slime can be. Oh my God. He looks like this it's so cute um so I'm gonna pick this guy and I select it again question and answer tool selection approval tool so delightful and slime is now working this is his new look but what's great about this new look is it is not just fixed this is not just going to be a fixed image although it's adorable. You will see if I say, awesome, slime, can you look up when the Odyssey is playing on IMAX in Daily City this week? Preferably during the day when I have a nanny. Ultimate AI use case finding IMAX tickets to the Odyssey.