Meta showed off Muse Charm, a keychain-sized device for talking to its Muse AI agent, as the surprise closer to Mark Zuckerberg’s Connect keynote in Menlo Park on Wednesday. Zuckerberg said the company plans to have it ready to ship for the holidays in December, but gave no price.
“We’ve packed a lot of technology in this little guy,” Zuckerberg said onstage. “So if you’re not wearing glasses, this is going to be by far the fastest way to talk to your Muse and to show them what’s going on around you,” he added, as quoted by Axios.
The Charm is about the size of an AirPods case and has a roughly 2-inch touchscreen and a built-in 5G connection, Reuters reported. Tapping a fingerprint sensor in the corner starts a conversation, and the screen shows an animated, interchangeable avatar, according to Engadget. Meta has built only a few units and still has to finalize the components and design. Business Insider said the screen shows Jolly, the Muse mascot, and cited a Bloomberg report that the device came out of Meta’s new design lab led by former Apple interface chief Alan Dye.
The timing puts Meta ahead of OpenAI, which bought Jony Ive’s startup last year to build its own AI device and has said little about it since, Business Insider noted. Axios wrote that OpenAI has spent billions on a hardware division and that Meta’s move “is likely to stun many analysts and investors.”
More for Muse
Muse launched earlier this month and climbed to No. 1 among free apps on Apple’s U.S. App Store, Business Insider reported. At Connect, Meta added live video chat, real-time voice conversations with custom voices and an email address for each person’s agent, Axios reported. New retail partners include Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora and Wayfair; Amazon has not allowed Muse to browse its store. Muse will also soon be able to operate apps on a Mac on a user’s behalf, CNN reported.
Meta said Muse is coming to its AI glasses but would only say “in the coming months.” Other glasses features announced alongside it include guided running and cycling workouts, nutrition tracking and product identification for shopping, per Meta’s Connect recap. For the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the company added cycling and transit directions on the in-lens screen and a voice-driven “hologram” of your face for WhatsApp calls that infers your expression from what you say, according to Meta’s announcement.
New glasses, with and without cameras
Ray-Ban Meta Audio is Meta’s first pair with no camera, a response to criticism of camera glasses that led some people to call them “pervert glasses,” TechCrunch reported. They weigh 43 grams and get up to 12 hours of battery life, or 48 hours with the charging case. They start at $349, with preorders opening October 13.
The camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 starts at $449 and is on sale now. It has a slimmer frame, a customizable action button, a six-mic array and up to nine hours of battery, an hour more than Gen 2. Meta said it will offer more than 100 AI glasses options by year-end, including a collaboration with the singer LISA.
The Meta VR Glasses weigh about 100 grams, which Meta says makes them five times lighter than the Quest 3. A tethered puck holds the processor, battery and storage, and the micro-OLED displays run 2412 x 2288 pixels per eye at up to 120Hz, The Verge reported. They go on sale in spring 2027 for $1,299.99.
Meta also has an FDA-cleared hearing enhancement feature for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. It launches in the U.S. later this year as a $149.99 add-on for supported glasses or with a Meta One subscription, though Ray-Ban models are not in the first rollout, Engadget reported.
The push comes as consumers grow wary of AI and venues from New York courtrooms to London pubs restrict camera glasses, CNN reported. Zuckerberg said: “At Meta, we are optimists because we believe in people.” He said he expects “billions” of people to use Muse in the years ahead.
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