How to get started with Meta's new AI agent, Muse

Again, this really depends on what you want to accomplish and how comfortable you are giving it access to other services. But even if you only ever connect it to other Meta apps, there's still a good amount you can do.

I was feeling more cautious at first so I decided to start with a few tasks related to my Facebook and Instagram activity. Like a lot of people, I save a ton of videos and posts on Instagram, but I rarely come back to them. A lot of this content is recipe videos that I always save with the intention of actually trying, but rarely actually remember to do so. That seemed like a good job for Muse.

I began by asking boo to go through all my saves on Facebook and Instagram, pull out the recipes and organize them into something more-easily readable and searchable, including the ingredient lists and recipe steps. It came back with an organized list of recipes, grouped by type, that shows the ingredients, steps and links back to the original post. It's basically like my own Instagram-powered recipe book. It also made me a similar, searchable guide using posts I'd saved about restaurants I'd like to one day check out, organized by city.

Meta has talked about travel planning as a major use case for Muse. As it turns out, I'm thinking about planning an international trip later this year, so I asked it to help me start researching details related to a potential itinerary. I gave it some info about timing and my preferences (nonstop flights only) and it provided a few flight options from my city and set up a price tracker to monitor the cost. I expect the trip would cover multiple cities, and it made a few suggestions about how to order the route. It even suggested that I consider a multi-city ticket so I can depart from a different airport than the one I'd fly into. None of that is exactly revelatory, but I like that it will monitor things like flight prices at a regular interval.

The more you use Muse, the more it will learn about you. And you can always check out the "ideas" tab, where Muse will list out a bunch of things it might be able to assist with. Some of these are generic, like offers to comparison shop, but others are more specific to your actual interests.

Again, some degree of caution is warranted. We have more than a few examples of AI agents going somewhat rogue after receiving a seemingly benign instruction, like booking an exercise class. Meta says it has multiple levels of safeguards in place, but there's still a chance something could go wrong or your agent could interpret a request in a strange way. So it's always a good idea to double-check what it's actually doing while it's claiming to work on your behalf.