Meta announced the availability of a new feature for its consumer artificial intelligence agent called Muse, which officially enables it to make outbound voice calls to US companies on behalf of users. This step comes after a short trial period that began last September, with the feature now moving into actual availability.
Subscription plans and pricing details
Despite the application's success in recently surpassing the 10 million user mark according to company statements, the calling feature will not be available for free. Meta clarified that access to this capability is restricted exclusively to subscribers of paid plans, which start at $20 per month for 500 million tokens weekly, up to a $100 per month option for heavy users granting 3 billion tokens weekly.
Alexander Wang, Head of Artificial Intelligence and responsible for Meta's Superintelligence Labs, noted that this feature is designed to handle annoying tasks that individuals avoid performing, such as communicating with telecommunications companies, government agencies, or restaurants that do not provide direct electronic reservation options.
Why does this news matter? And what changes practically?
This move aims to address growing consumer frustration with dealing with complex automated response systems and slow traditional customer service. Instead of waiting for long periods on phone lines, the user can enlist their smart agent to handle these repetitive tasks. However, this technology faces practical challenges represented by how companies and employees receive these calls, as many receptionists hang up the phone upon realizing that the speaker is not a real human, despite the continuous development in the ability of artificial intelligence models to accurately simulate human voices.
On the other hand, the company revealed the impending launch of an email address creation feature via Muse for free users soon, in an effort to expand the scope of services available to everyone while keeping advanced features like phone calls within the paid tiers.