Apps & Consumer
Instinct and Meta's Muse AI agents can now make calls
Instinct and Meta's Muse, rival AI assistant apps, both added features that let their agents place phone calls on users' behalf, reaching feature parity.
Text-based AI assistants are a hot market right now, with Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta’s Muse agent — which launched last week — all vying for users’ attention and tasks. San Francisco-based Instinct is one of the most popular of the group, attracting heavy investor interest at what is reportedly a $10 billion valuation.
Instinct’s popularity may grow further after it added a new calling feature that lets its agent place calls and act as a concierge. Founder Noah Shinn announced on X that the feature, called Instinct Concierge, can do things like book restaurants that don’t take online reservations, get users on a dentist’s cancellation list, or sort out problems with a cable bill; it’s rolling out in early access to some users, with plans to expand to everyone over time. Meta’s Muse assistant has kept pace, gaining the same ability to place calls to US businesses — though Meta said the feature will roll out first to users who specifically ask Muse to make a call, which effectively doubles as a feature-request mechanism the company plans to use for future launches too.
The calling features arrive after a number of rivals had touted the ability to make calls as an edge over Instinct; with Concierge now live, they’re all roughly at parity on that front. Instinct has been shipping fast elsewhere as well — last week it rolled out email addresses that let the assistant handle account sign-up and management, and it now lets users’ assistants contact other people’s assistants to manage certain tasks, by adding those users to a trusted network.
Both apps have seen strong traction over the past few weeks. Instinct raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation last month and is reportedly now in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, with investors showing heavy interest in text-based assistants that can act across different surfaces on a user’s behalf. Analytics firm Sensor Tower found that Muse actually outgrew the broader Meta AI app’s own launch in its first few days: the app drew more than 730,000 downloads in the US, compared with 707,000 downloads for the Meta AI app in its first five days post-launch, and at one point reached the No. 2 spot on the top charts.
Why it matters
As Instinct and Muse race to match each other feature for feature, the fight over AI “concierge” assistants is starting to look less like a product contest and more like a battle for which agent becomes the default interface between users and the outside world.