What happened
At Connect 2026 on 23 September 2026, Meta announced video calls, agent email addresses and Mac desktop control for its Muse agent.
Why it matters
An agent that can read your screen and send email outside the app means the shopping and privacy trade-off is now yours to manage.
Remember this
Meta's Muse agent can now see you and talk to you
More context & who is affected
At Connect 2026 in San Jose on 23 September, Meta gave its Muse agent three upgrades at once: live video calls, its own email address and the power to run apps on your Mac.
The Muse Realtime Avatar model drives facial and body motion, and you can customise the avatar look and voice. A wake-word smart-glasses version is also planned.
Agents that email outside the app come with approval gates and an audit trail, so shopping and Mac control are the real privacy question.
- Launch date
- 8 Sep 2026 Muse was introduced on 8 September 2026 with a cloud-hosted Muse Secure VM per agent.TechCrunch
- Video feature
- Realtime Avatar The Muse Realtime Avatar model animates the avatar face and body during live video calls.The VergeTechCrunch
- Agent email
- Own inbox Agents keep their own email address, with approval gates and an audit trail for sensitive actions.The VergeTechCrunch
- Developer demand
- 1,500+ Meta received more than 1,500 third-party connector applications in under a week.TechCrunch
What Meta showed at Connect 2026
One keynote turned a chat assistant into an agent that can see, speak, email and click around your Mac.
- Muse launched 8 Sep 2026 on iOS, Android and web in the US
- Voice calling added during the week of 18 Sep 2026
- Video calls, agent email and Mac control announced 23 Sep
- Smart-glasses wake-word version planned for coming months
General Public
Muse can reach the full Shopify catalog and pay through Shop Pay, PayPal and Lync across retail partners.
Business Executives · Developers
A Mac-capable agent can keep working through queued jobs after you walk away from your computer.
General Public
Reading your screen and emailing outside the app puts approval gates and audit trails under real pressure.
Story updates 4
Key developments (4)
Follow-up events appended to this developing story
-
Muse instructions describe hourly profiles of people in users’ lives
WIRED’s examination of Muse files describes an hourly relationship-profile process; Meta says the files were intentionally accessible.
Source: WIRED -
Meta adds signposting detector and red-teaming agent
Meta discloses 33.2M actions globally and 5.3M in India for child sexual exploitation content in H1 2026 alongside the new signposting LLM.
Source: TechCrunch -
Bank CEOs called Brainfood founder in a panic over Muse
Brainfood's Sam Taylor says three bank CEOs called him in a panic asking whether they must launch their own agent after Meta Muse.
Source: MTS Live (X/Twitter) -
Meta's Muse stays free while OpenAI's Dots goes paid: agent race splits on price
Verge Decoder episode explains how Muse's free consumer push and Dots' paid enterprise pitch split the agent market.
Source: The Verge
Reporting fromThe Verge ↗TechCrunch ↗
Sources & verification2 sources · 4 claims
These are the records behind this briefing. Linked reporting is not the same as independent confirmation.
- The VergeReporting
Meta is making Muse more powerful and will let you video chat with it, too ↗
Published Sep 23, 2026 · Accessed Sep 24, 2026 - TechCrunchReportingPublished Sep 23, 2026 · Accessed Sep 24, 2026
Claims and linked sources
Meta announced video conversations with a customizable avatar, agent email addresses and Mac computer-use support at Connect 2026 on 23 September 2026.
A Muse Realtime Avatar model animates the avatar facial and body motion, and users will be able to customise both its appearance and its voice.
Alexandr Wang said Muse will operate any app on a user Mac, clicking, typing and navigating the desktop.
Muse launched on 8 September 2026 on iOS, Android and the web in the US, running the Muse Spark model inside a Muse Secure VM.
