Waiting on hold is the most universally hated chore in modern life, and Meta now wants to charge you to skip it. Muse, the company’s AI agent, can place phone calls on your behalf, but only if you pay for a separate subscription.
Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced the feature as a way to handle “calls you don’t want to make.” Think restaurant reservations, appointment scheduling, and the dreaded hold queue. The subscription also adds more tokens and a few extra features, so calling is part of a bigger paywall rather than a standalone product.
Early reports are decent. Matt Schlicht, creator of Moltbook and a Meta Superintelligence employee, shared a recreation of a call his agent made to a Volvo dealership last month. Muse waited on hold and came back with the info he needed. That’s a friendly demo from an insider, so treat it with some caution. But the task is exactly the sort of boring, low-stakes errand where agents should shine.
The more interesting detail is what Muse said on that call. It told the person it was calling on Schlicht’s behalf and that it was transcribing the conversation. It did not explicitly say it was an AI. For a simple question about car service, that may be fine. For anything more complicated, calls can go sideways, and some people will hang up the moment they suspect a bot. Disclosure norms for voice agents are still unsettled, and regulators have already shown interest in AI-generated calls. Meta will have to pick a clear policy eventually.
The timing fits a pattern. Muse has drawn more than 10 million users, according to Meta, and the company keeps adding agent features at a steady clip. Users can now give their agent a dedicated email address, which lets it join important threads without getting full access to an inbox. That is a sensible privacy compromise, and a smarter one than the all-or-nothing permissions most assistants ask for.
Meta isn’t first here. Google has offered “Call For Me” on Pixel phones for years, and Instinct recently added a “Concierge” feature for its agent aimed at more complex calls. The difference is distribution and price. Google’s version is a phone feature, while Meta is tying calls to a subscription and a growing agent platform.
Does it matter? Somewhat. Phone calling is a practical test of whether agents can handle messy real-world interactions, not just chat windows. If Muse holds up outside curated demos, the paid tier gets a genuine selling point. If it stumbles on the first confused receptionist, it’s another feature that looks better in a clip than in daily use.
