Meta became the latest to dip its toes into the fraught world of hardware AI widgets this week after it unveiled a Tamagotchi-sized handheld AI companion called the Muse Charm. The Social Network now joins several hardware startups which have attempted to use handheld devices to bring agentic AI to a more mainstream audience. The Humane AI pin and Rabbit’s r1 are just two examples. The Muse Charm follows a similar trajectory. The handheld device appears to be roughly the size of an Apple Watch and features a cute, inoffensive teddy bear shaped avatar that will communicate through voice interactions with the user. Meta’s choice of avatars here may have been influenced by the “sensual” chatbot controversy involving underage youths earlier this year. What sets Meta apart from many AI hardware startups is that it has direct control over the hardware, software, and models used. Many early AI widgets relied on off-the-shelf models from the likes of OpenAI. Meta hasn’t said which of its Muse models will run on the device, but given its diminutive size, we suspect, at most, it’ll run voice-to-text and text-to-speech models locally while the avatar’s responses will be generated by its Muse LLMs running in the cloud. Meta’s Charm is expected to ship for Christmas just in time to relive the nostalgia of unboxing your first Tamagotchi. We can only hope that Muse Charm’s avatar won’t die from neglect if you take a break to escape the AI hype cycle and touch some grass. Pricing, which could make or break a tchotchke like this, remains a mystery. It’s also unclear what value over a standalone app it might provide. Most folks these days carry a perfectly capable slab of glass and silicon in their pockets everywhere they go. This was a common criticism of the Rabbit R1. While the physical form factor had its charm, many felt it was an expensive gimmick that could have been an app, which Rabbit launched this week. Of course Meta isn’t the only major model dev searching for a Trojan horse to get the general public hooked on their AI models. OpenAI has tapped famed Apple designer Jony Ive to design its first AI handheld. Meta does have the advantage of having built physical hardware before, which has clearly given it a head start not only on handheld AI assistants and wearables, but also on the privacy headaches that come along with them. Strapping cameras to people’s faces, perhaps to no one’s great surprise, has enabled abuse, while Meta’s glasses have earned the less-than-flattering moniker “pervert glasses.” This public relations debacle has led Meta to release a new version of its Meta Glasses that ditches the camera entirely, but it seems just on that one model. ®
