Meta rolls out Muse voice chat and animated avatars to US users

Meta has added live voice conversations and an animated avatar to Muse, its personal AI agent. Users start a call from a phone icon in the top-right corner, can interrupt at any point, and Muse responds right away; it can keep working on tasks in the background during a call. The avatar shows facial expressions and gestures matched to the tone of the conversation and reacts while the user is still speaking. Users can choose voice only, the avatar beside the conversation, or full screen. Hundreds of voices with different personalities are available and can be switched at any time.

The avatars run on Muse Realtime Avatar, built by Meta Superintelligence Labs and first shown at Meta Connect in September. Meta says its own raters preferred these avatars to those from Runway and HeyGen, and notes that not all of its demonstrations reflect the avatars available in the app. The feature is available now on phones, the web and Mac, in the US only. Meta says voice conversations will come next to its AI glasses and the Muse Charm clip-on device, without giving a date for either.

Why it matters for digital humans: This is a general-purpose assistant shipping a real-time photorealistic avatar as a front-end option rather than a separate product, on consumer-scale distribution. The side-by-side preference claim against Runway and HeyGen is Meta's own internal rater test, not an independent benchmark, and should be read as such. For practitioners the more useful signal is positioning: if the avatar layer becomes a free feature of an assistant people already have, the question for standalone interactive-avatar vendors shifts from model quality to controllability, brand ownership and deployment surface.