Rival AI agents Instinct and Meta's Muse add call feature
agents anthropic apple meta
| Source: TechCrunch | Original article
AI assistants Instinct and Meta’s Muse now let users place phone calls, enabling tasks like restaurant reservations and subscription cancellations.
Rival AI assistants Instinct and Meta’s Muse have both been upgraded with the ability to place phone calls on behalf of users. The new feature lets the agents dial U.S. businesses to book restaurant tables, cancel subscriptions and perform other routine tasks. Meta says the capability will initially appear only when a user explicitly asks Muse to make a call, while Instinct is already shipping the function as part of its rapid rollout schedule.
The move marks a tangible step in the race to embed “personal AI” directly into everyday consumer workflows. By handling voice‑based transactions, the agents move beyond text‑only queries and into actions that traditionally required a human intermediary. For users, the convenience of a single conversational interface that can both locate a service and secure it by phone could accelerate adoption of AI assistants in domains such as hospitality, retail and subscription management.
The development also underscores the growing importance of tool‑calling mechanisms that let language models interact with external APIs and telephony services – a topic we explored in our recent explainer on how AI agents execute calls. As more providers add similar capabilities, competition will likely focus on reliability, privacy safeguards and geographic coverage. Regulators may also take a closer look at how AI‑mediated calls handle personal data and consent, especially as the technology expands beyond the United States.
Watch for broader rollouts of the calling feature, integration with additional business directories, and any announcements from other AI players seeking to match Instinct and Muse’s new functionality. The next few weeks should reveal how quickly users adopt voice‑enabled agents and whether the convenience outweighs emerging concerns about security and oversight.
Sources
Back to AIPULSEN