Muse Gadgets
gadgets.muse.aiI'll go against the grain and say that I like this, I genuinely don't think this is anything but some internal team being excited about their product and giving you some firmware to connect stuff to their agents. Meta the trillion dollar company will not move at all from this.
This looks exiting for tinkerers. This feels like the early days of voice assistants again except it’s more AI driven this time.
yes, but:
why build here? why should we grow our gardens in this factory farm?
if this muse gadget seems so cool, why not make your own?
don’t outsource your curiosity to people like this, they do not care about you, your family, or your livelihood. they want to control you; this is their toy that they made for you to become fascinated by
First, the muse gadget is just an API and SDK. It’s a fun toy for silly projects.
The software world is spoiled in that making something new is just text in a file, we’ve proliferated open source freeware, and with AI we can readily clone entire products in a weekend.
Sometimes though, people like to use commercial products for various reasons (reliability, cost, network effect, etc). If you like to tinker, this seems like a neat way for some without yak shaving an AI assistant along the way. We don’t need to reinvent every wheel for everything.
I personally think “embodied” assistants are a really fun idea, and this is just an API and SDK to build on and it’s super accessible to basically everyone in the world. If you were inclined to use Muse already, why not tinker with this. I’m sure the hardware would be easy enough to point to an API running on your own server later if you wanted.
Meta should have called it Abuse Gadgets instead of Muse Gadgets.
After all, React is a Graphical Abuser Interface Toolkit, so it would be on brand. React is the Virtual DOM, and you're the Actual SUB.
The firmware is Apache 2.0, so yes, you can point it at your own server. But read the token terms before you plant anything: "not a supported product and not a developer platform... may change, stop working, or be withdrawn at any time, with or without notice," and you "may not enable functionality that Meta has disabled." Max 50 devices, none sold or advertised.
That's not a platform, it's a petting zoo with a revocable leash. You're not a hacker, you're a sharecropper. Meta's word for it is "gadgets." The honest word is "tenants."
I think this is better suited for the vast majority of people would never begin to garden than for farmers.
Well like that’s your opinion. You aren’t forced to use the platform just vibe. Code it instead
Indeed and Ai keychain voice assistants can double as a home Ai smart speaker and also conversing with it via earbuds when out and about.
I was a bit shocked last week to see Zuckerberg announce the Muse Charm keychain as that's what I suggested and blogged about in August -- portable Ai speakers are best suited on keychains.
https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...
I want a red light/green light for my Office Desk.
Red meaning "I'm working on something important. Disturb only if emergency"
Green being, "I'm scattershot, come hang"
This is the perfect platform for stuff like this.
If you mean a physical light, you can buy light switches and coloured bulbs from a hardware store.
These are readily available. I visited a place once where they had one of these in every cubicle, and it was synced with whatever your current status on Lync (nowadays called MS Teams) was.
Note that most of the staff absolutely hated it.
Fair take, but I'm not seeing anything that makes me buy that rosy theory over Meta just doing PR to get adoption in the dev community.
typical... will use the will power of open source tinkerers and enthusiasts to build goodwill and then enshittify. this is meta.
It won't move because anyone with a brain won't use this, but I was also surprised at how many people put Bezos-listening devices in their own home.
The general theme of meta's approach across the board here is interesting - basically, they are trying to win in part by taking risks others aren't willing to. I can imagine they saw that all the success is coming so far when a someone is willing to cross a boundary that wasn't previously thought acceptable - from releasing ChatGPT in the first place, to things like OpenClaw.
So now they are actively distributing SDKs and to let people "hack" custom hardware integrations to their already risky AI agents unleashed on the general public. Giving agents abilty to control things in the physical world - what could possibly go wrong?
But here we are: so far the story is pretty much 100% "fortune favors the bold", and Meta is leaning into it.
It is weird, a year and a half ago I wrote a blog post (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...) basically describing a lot of what Muse does, except all hosted locally. I included a section about using hardware around the house to enhance AI agents.
When the initial Muse launch happened, my first reaction was "wow this sounds familiar."
Now the HW side of things is announced.
To be fair, this is all obvious stuff that should be done. The key is who can pull it off. It has been pointed out many types that technically Muse is nothing new, some combination of Gemini products can already do it. The counterpoint being that packaging and branding make a product.
I am kind of sad that desktop computer use ended up being the way to go instead of hooking into mobile phones. Mobile phones allow for a lot more potential integrations with day to day life, plenty of services now days are (sadly) only available through a mobile app.
I think if someone can bring the Jonathan Computer and a mobile device that connects with that ecosystem, will be going towards a future we all want.
Modularity, connection, and true ownership.
Meta has never created anything successful since getting lucky with Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp were acquisitions. Facebook Phone, the Libra shitcoin, and Metaverse VR were all flops. Jury's still out on the much-maligned "pervert glasses", but maybe those will sell.
Now they're trying a new thing. I don't know if it's so much "being bold" as flailing around for some new thing. They really desperately want to own a "platform" like Microsoft, Apple, or Google.
I don't totally disagree but I think you understate the level of competence needed to integrate and make successful the acquisitions. And they navigated the valley of death from desktop to mobile. And Threads is an interesting example everyone ignores that is 100% in-house and has actually established a strong user base. At very least, Meta has avoided the fate of so many others that came before - Yahoo, MySpace, etc and in part that is because Zuck made big bets at the right time that many people thought were insane (buying WhatsApp, Instagram etc).
Threads is shit.
In Brazil we say “shoothing all way around”
> But here we are: so far the story is pretty much 100% "fortune favors the bold", and Meta is leaning into it.
Been thinking about this lately when I saw some mathematicians talking about more AI regulation after the millennial prize thing.
Move fast break things, fortune favors the bold, breaking rules doesn't matter if you win, etc silicon valley ideologies to me seem to be domination ideologies. Uber may toy with playing nice with taxi law until it's too annoying, then they shift to getting as many people as possible to have their commute, convenience, or livelihood to depend on it, then they can turn around to regulators with their finger on their chin and say "oopsies, I guess everyone needs us now, better consider that in your regulatory efforts!"
It's the brunch equivalent of changing the restaurant the night before to one you prefer by DMing everyone in the group chat with "we decided to change to antipodean because dave had a breakup with one of the waiters at french twist," and then when everyone arrives and Dave says "I've never dated a waiter in my life," you say "well we're all already here so..."
Anyway, it seems pointless to try to regulate this culture out of these kinds of companies or really this entire scene. Any law is now just an obstacle, and besides, various government actors seem to be angling for industry retirement positions, so passing useful regulation seems basically impossible.
Imo two can play at this game. When law fails to serve the interests of the people or is even weaponized by the interests of Capital against us, what's the point of it? I'm interested in things like LLM distillation and open weight models that take the winds of profit out of the sails of these "disruptors" to make their activities have no payoff. Wonder what other things we can do that would make someone ask "why would I send all my data to Facebook when I could instead just..." Pirating, free culture, leaks, hell outright theft, if we're going to disrupt things, why not DISRUPT things?
This and the Meta VR stuff - I would be all over it if it weren't Meta. It's objectively cool tech.
But you're handcuffed.
I second this. Zuck gives me the ick, like that corpo villain in Ready Player One.
He wants to own the future for the sake of money, not because he wants to improve lives or entertain folks.
I can see the VR stuff, but why this? It seems like anyone bold enough to hack on local hardware would have no trouble working outside Muse as an ecosystem.
Yeah that is what bothers me. I can't get Muse in Australia anyway (could probably VPN I guess) but would be keen when someone else more reliable/trustworthy.
I'm generally skeptical and critical of most things that Meta is doing ("fool me once...") and I definitely won't trust them enough to use their agents and give them any more data than I already do, but this is a super cute and fun idea!
I love microcontrollers and DIY IoT as a hobby, a huge fan of ESP32s (so affordable and perfectly packaged in ready-to-use boards), and I can see how such easy, vibe-coded projects can inspire more people and show them how easy it is to get started with them today. (I remember my first experiments with microcontrollers and DSPs at college in 00s - the nightmare of even just flashing those devices, not to mention the almost-prohibitive cost to get them and the sometimes required JTAG programmers I faced in Poland... My BSc thesis project was reduced in scope a few times because my professor couldn't get some purchases and shipments approved on time)
A toy with not much value? Sure. But who cares, it's fun and inspiring! They even recommend vibe-building so that the user doesn't need to download or configure SDKs. Awesome stuff for complete beginners to this area.
Over a decade ago, I could see Google releasing such a whimsy, hackersy fun toy project. Sadly, not anymore... (Saying this as a former Google employee in 2017-2022, witnessing in person the sad, gradual change from hacker culture to corporate culture)
I said it before, and I'll say it again. The winners of the AI race are going to be the ones who control the products to deliver the AI features to the end users. The obvious ones are Google with its myriad of consumer tech, then we have Apple, Meta, Microsoft, etc. That's why OpenAI, Anthropic are desperate to build the applications themselves than being just an API provider. Meta is better off focusing on such initiatives than trying to complete with the labs on the model strength. They seem to have realised that finally, so that's refreshing. Whether the solutions they bring are useful or not is a different question, but this is definitely how you reach the end users, not with the strongest models.
A Meta ecosystem is definitely not coming to my household.
agreed. I only have Facebook and that is out of necessity. I never post on it.
Literally yesterday I ordered an ESP32-C5 board to build a home network proxy for cloud agents (including but not limited to Muse), and today they announce this. I guess this is confirmation I'm on the right track.
Please do not waste hardware (nowadays valuable) on Meta's privacy-leaking garbage.
It says make it your own. Then
> Gadgets you build with the Muse Gadget SDK need a token. Add it to your SDK configuration so your gadgets can pair with the Muse app.
> Each token can be used by a limited number of devices.
> The Muse Gadget SDK is intended for personal tinkering and is not a supported product or developer platform. The SDK can change, break, or stop functioning without warning.
Doesn't really feel like it's my own.
That has been the nature of every Facebook API ever released
Needing a token to call someone's API seems reasonable to me.
Clearly you just made the completely unique mistake of not understanding it’s more like the “ownership” of digital movies, games and music where there is clearly no ownership. That is completely obvious to anyone who would see the word “own”…at least according to most companies court filings.
(I joke, but not really…)
our digital landlords, we are but serfs
What an interesting timeline, I bought an Seeed reTerminal E1001 just few weeks ago and loaded it with ESP Home for my daily morning brief, and here Meta is advertising support for this niche hacker product.
This being Facebook is hard to trust with everything even considering they already have a lot of info on you
This took no time to flash onto a Stick S3 using codex to pull everything. The interface is interesting. I can't get it to respond to a voice message though.
Here are some fun things I've worked on for the S3: https://rillsound.com
Voice issue was recently fixed! Now you can send voice in, get text out, and use your own TTS API if needed.
I honestly don’t think I would have any gadget from meta even if they payed me.
As for AI, I would only use it for work and as a substitute for google search and don’t want it to do anything else in my personal life
It's a matter of time until Alexa, Google Home, and Siri leverage their device ecosystems to pull users into their Muse/Instinct alternative (whatever we end up calling this market).
This looks like a really smart way for Meta to bootstrap a hardware ecosystem around Muse.
100% vibe coded page
Zuck realized the metaverse wouldn’t work, so now he’s creating the Musiverse.
An AI from Meta on my house… FEAR!!!
My hope is that, like Jev, we're going to see Open alternatives to Muse using this framework within days
I am gonna be so pissed if ESP32 prices spike
ESP32 survived even the 2020 chip shortage unscathed. I struggle to imagine this making a dent.
And a lot of us would feel the same way, so to prevent this, we start buying a bit more, prices raise a bit, so a bit more people get scared and...
Will not limited to ESP32.
No way in hell will I give Meta access to my IoT network.
Why would I ever want Facebook to have access to anything I own, think, or post if I could avoid it?
Thats very @dps
I don't get it
Hahaha
Muse(um) of gadgets. Anachronistic on arrival.
So many possibilities, especially connecting to the real agent :D
Neat idea, but I don't know how it would work to let non-deterministically led software/hardware hang out on private home networks.
typical... will use the will power of open source tinkerers and enthusiasts to build goodwill and then enshittify. this is meta.
ill wait for the inevitable "foss community open source alternative" version
We actually already have this: the combination of Home Assistant, ESPHome, and HA-MCP/CLI.
I wish Anthropic would robustify their bluetooth implementation (Developer > Hardware Buddy...)
The larping as a grassroots/open source product is really off-putting. The only reason anyone would use this is that its "free" and comes with preloaded prompts for non-technical people.
No thanks.
LARPing would imply pretending to do something, but not actually doing it. Here they appear to be actually doing it (open source product). Is there something Im missing?
A surplus of outrage and a willingness to share your unfiltered reactions to things, I guess.
celebrities and billionaires always catch more heat, can we not call out their bs?
You only addressed half of it. I'm with you that the code is open source, but it's an open source client for Meta's proprietary service. The one original piece of hardware on this "Open source hardware for your Muse" page, the Home Link, only works with an active subscription. And the "grassroots" part is clearly larpy: a "by hackers, for hackers" voice in a Meta incubator repo.
It does not say you have to keep an active subscription for continued operation. The page only says:
Claim your Muse Home Link Free with an active Muse subscriptionhttps://muse.ai/deviceterms "If your Muse subscription terminates or expires, your Muse Device will cease to function as described in these Device Terms and the device documentation. The device's capabilities will be unavailable until an active subscription is restored."
https://gadgets.muse.ai/home-link "Muse Home Link itself only runs official firmware and can’t be reflashed"
Clause 6 esp 6c makes this completely unfree and probably worse in the regard than an HP inkjet.
Was this the AI that gives strangers your home address or am I confusing it for something else?
Just think of the possibilities—previously Muse invited someone to the user's house from Facebook Marketplace, but sadly the user wasn't home, and so got angry. But if you connect Muse to your Internet of Things—why, Muse could just unlock the door for your guest! You don't even need to be aware that they're coming. Surprise guests!
It was discovered that the person hit "always approve" when their muse asked them if it could give out their address.
Oh, thank God it was such a specific and unique human error. There's no way almost everybody using AI via Meta products aren't just clicking "always approve" on their app lol
Ah, yes, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for Meta to request.
this guy reads every single eula an cookie popup