Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused

Meta’s Muse, a personal AI agent that books travel, fills out forms, and shops on a user’s behalf, has already proven popular with the masses, but a new side project could be particularly alluring to tinkerers and hackers.

On Friday, the company introduced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project that lets developers build their own hardware that connects to Muse.

Meta is providing open-source firmware (the low-level software that runs a device), and a Linux software development kit (SDK), along with a few project ideas to get users started. These include giving Muse a color e-ink display or loading it onto a stick that plugs into a TV’s HDMI port.

There don’t appear to be many limits, either. Users can set up a low-cost hobbyist computer like a Raspberry Pi or an off-the-shelf ESP32 board, and then connect Muse “to your displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else you’ve got lying on your workbench,” Meta notes.

The company has also set up a Discord channel to support users.

Meta has already tried the code itself, naturally. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, said in a post on X that the company built a gadget called Muse Home Link. The USB-C-powered device lets Muse connect to a home network and talk to the smart devices on it, including speakers and smart TVs.

Meta made 5,000 of these Home Links, in fact, and is giving them away for free to Muse subscribers while supplies last, according to Friedman. Considering Friedman’s post about Home Link received nearly 30,000 views in a few hours, we’re guessing those freebies have been claimed. Friedman said Home Link would be ready to ship a few weeks.

Muse Gadgets may not have wide appeal, but it fits nicely into Meta’s all-in strategy to make Muse more than a standalone chatbot. Meta isn’t content to push Muse on everyday consumers; it’s also trying to woo small businesses and enterprises.

The company earlier this week introduced Muse for Small Business, which is free with usage limits and connects Muse to tools such as Shopify, Dropbox, and Slack. It has also launched a new business unit, Meta Enterprise Platform, to help it push its AI offerings to businesses and corporate customers.

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Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

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