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Meta opens Muse's live video-chat avatar to every US user

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The short version

Meta made Muse Voice, its real-time animated avatar for the Muse AI agent, available to all US users on November 5, 2026, two months after first demoing it at Connect.

Meta opens Muse's live video-chat avatar to every US user

Meta's personal AI agent can now take a video call. Muse Voice, the feature that lets US users talk face to face with an animated version of their agent, left limited testing and became available to everyone in the country on November 5, 2026, according to TechCrunch.

What shipped

Two new models power the feature: Muse Realtime Avatar and Muse Realtime Voice. Together they animate a digital character, nicknamed Jolly by default, that reacts with what Meta calls "subtle expressions and gestures" timed to the conversation. Muse cannot actually see the person talking to it; it hears audio and responds to that. Users can swap the default character for one that looks more like a person, an animal, or something else entirely, per TechCrunch's report. Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, first showed the feature working at Meta's Connect conference in September and posted a demo video of his own Muse, styled as a fluffy white dog, cracking jokes about his social-media habits.

The rollout runs on mobile, web, and Mac today. Meta says AI Glasses and an upcoming pocket-sized wearable called Muse Charm will get it later. Charm matters here because it changes where this feature lives: Meta detailed the device at Connect as a roughly 2-inch-screen pendant due before the end of 2026, built specifically to run Muse conversations away from a phone. A talking, customizable avatar is a much better fit for a tiny always-on screen than a chat window is, which is likely why Meta pushed the avatar to general availability now rather than waiting for Charm to ship.

An agent that already runs your Mac, now with a face

Since mid-September, Muse's Mac app has been able to read and act on files, messages, calendar entries, notes, and mail inside their native applications, with the user approving sensitive actions first. Layering a live avatar onto that access raises the same question Meta has faced with every Muse expansion this fall: whether presenting the agent as a friendly character makes people more comfortable handing it broader permissions than they'd grant a plain chat interface. Meta's own framing, that an avatar "could make consumers feel more connected to their AI agent," is explicitly built around that effect.

Muse launched in the US on September 8 with a free tier alongside subscription plans RuntimeWire has reported at $20 and $100 a month. None of Meta's pricing or avatar materials disclose how heavily those paid tiers are used, so there is no public data yet on whether video chat moves people onto them.

What to watch next

Meta has not given a timeline for taking Muse Voice outside the US. The more concrete date is Muse Charm's "before year-end" ship window; once that device is in hands, it will be the first hardware built around the avatar from the start rather than bolted onto an existing chat app. Worth tracking alongside it: whether the Mac integration's filesystem access draws the kind of security scrutiny Pondero covered in September, now that more of Muse's interface is a face people are inclined to trust.

Sources