Muse just got a body

Welcome back to MuseyMe.

Your replies to issue one made our week, so keep them coming.

The catch up

• Build your own Muse. On Friday, Meta open sourced Muse Gadgets: firmware and kits for building a Muse device on anything from ESP32 boards (cheap wireless chips hobbyists love) to a tiny Raspberry Pi. Day one builds: a pocket eReader clipped to a phone with MagSafe, a desk e ink display, an old iPhone and a conference badge.
• A free plug for your TV. Muse Home Link is a USB-C plug that lets Muse reach your TV, speakers and printer. Meta made 5,000, free for US subscribers while they lasted. The supplies are probably gone now, but members of r/MuseAgent had the news within 15 minutes of the announcement.
• 5 million downloads in 22 days, Forbes reports. Sensor Tower, the app analytics firm, counted 5.1 million, against 2.3 million for ChatGPT, 400,000 for Grok and 100,000 for Claude over the same window. What this means for you: Meta will devote tons of resources to this space due to its success, the time is now to invest in the Muse ecosystem
• Muse goes to work. Tuesday's Muse for Small Business added connectors for Slack, QuickBooks, Shopify and Zoom. Our favorite detail: Muse has to ask before it publishes, sends or spends anything.

Prompt of the week

YouTuber Nate B Jones gave Muse his most boring job: find forgotten subscriptions and cancel the dead ones. It found $5,350 a year, and he's cancelled $1,285 so far. His video is here. Copy this into Muse:

Find every subscription I am paying for that I have forgotten about, and help me cancel the ones I am not using.

Three more things to try

• Book the karaoke room. The bar hung up on one user's Muse, so Muse handed the call to Fo, a rival agent startup that uses human helpers, and Fo booked the room.
• File a small claims lawsuit. It was Phillip Jackson's very first Muse task. A couple of days later, the court issued the summons.
• Let the weather dress your mascot. One user has Muse check the forecast at 7:30 every morning and dress its mascot to match, starting with an oatmeal cardigan for a cloudy Monday.

This week on r/MuseAgent

• 26 ways to use Muse. u/SpanglerBQ spent 60+ hours writing up 26 use cases, from news alerts to a custom kanban board to D&D prep, plus a full YouTube walkthrough.
• $7,000 in university charges, gone. After months of being ignored, u/vainjuggler gave Muse his university account. It pulled the paper trail, found courses he was never enrolled in, and routed the dispute to people who could fix it.
• Push past the limits. u/meeninta's power user guide covers tricks like a headed Chromium VM over Tailscale for blocked sites, and iMessage through a Mac.
• Your own morning show. u/ImInundated turned a personal dashboard (weather, stocks, sleep, nutrition, news, birthdays, trips) into a 10 minute podcast that drops at 6:30 AM, with an RSS feed for the car.
• New here? Start here. u/ChuncknMyTrunk asked what everyone actually uses Muse for. Highlights: an AT&T bill negotiated down $50 a month over chat, and an automatic weekly fantasy football newsletter with dark humor.

Muse of the week

This week's pick: a plush little fellow in a brown jacket and green cape with a leaf pin, by u/donhoa.

Every Thursday, r/MuseAgent runs a thread for showing off Muse avatars. Post yours and it might be next.

Features you might have missed

• Report a broken pole. One user photographed tangled wires on a utility pole and asked Muse to get Verizon to fix it. Muse filed the request on Verizon's site.
• Get a form check. Amy Li uploads workout videos, and Muse builds a 3D model of her, watches from any angle, and scores her form on every rep.
• Skip the hold music. One user had Muse sit on hold with Southwest and call him the moment a human picked up. It's one of 13 real setups in a roundup by writer Matt Van Horn.
• For builders: Tailscale, the tool that links your computers into one private network, says Muse can now join as its own device and work with your self hosted services, with your existing access rules still in charge.

Muse Safety Watch

• Know what Gmail access means. Ben Mathes posted screenshots of Muse admitting a background feature read an Amazon email and messaged him about it, after twice saying it only searches Gmail when asked. He says the only off switch is disconnecting Gmail, and that the fix belongs with the product, not the model.
• Apple Messages. AppleInsider, the Apple news site, reported that Muse uploads Apple Messages contents even when told not to. Meta told TechCrunch it can't read Apple Messages without explicit permission, and disputed the journalist's account.
• The full handover. u/BeardedHero93 connected nearly everything: health stats, bank accounts, Apple Home, Ring cameras, his truck's location and his entire 2TB iCloud. Some members are calling this 'Musemaxxing'
• Decide for yourself. BBC News asked whether Muse is a helpful agent or a Trojan horse, weighing what it can do against how much of your life it needs to see.

That's issue two. Forward it to a friend, and reply to tell us what you're doing with Muse. See you next Sunday.

Musey Me

A little Muse. Every Sunday.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with Meta.