Rival AI agents, Instinct and Meta’s Muse, both add the ability to make calls

Text-based AI assistants are a hot market, with Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta’s Muse agent, which launched last week, vying for users’ attention and tasks. San Francisco-based Instinct is one of the most popular of the lot, attracting huge investor interest at what is reportedly a $10 billion valuation.

Instinct’s popularity may now grow even further, as it’s added a new calling feature that lets your agent place calls and act as a concierge. Meta’s Muse, another serious contender in this battle, has also done the same.

Instinct’s founder Noah Shinn announced on X that the buzzy startup’s new calling feature, Instinct Concierge, can do things like book restaurants that don’t take online reservations, get on your dentist’s cancellation list, or sort out problems with your cable bill. The feature is rolling out in early access to some users, with plans to expand to all users in time, he said.

Though Instinct is shipping fast, Meta’s Muse AI assistant is keeping up. It also just gained the ability to place calls to U.S. businesses. The tech giant said the feature will first roll out to users who ask Muse to make a call. (This essentially serves as a feature request mechanism, and Meta said that whenever Muse launches new features, they’ll be available first to people who ask Muse about them.)

These calling features arrive as a number of rivals had been touting their ability to make calls as an advantage over Instinct; but with Instinct’s Concierge feature rollout, they’re all now in parity with each other on this front.

Last week, Instinct also rolled out email addresses to let Instinct handle account sign-up and management. The company additionally now allows its users’ assistants to contact other people’s assistants for managing certain tasks, by adding those users to a trusted network.

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