Meta Muse Opens Paid U.S. Business Calling After September Test

By Daniel Okafor

Meta says Muse now lets paying subscribers place calls to U.S. businesses on their behalf, after a September test, on plans starting at $20 a month. The rollout ends a limited-access phase that began with a small group of early adopters.

Who can use Muse calling now?

Meta’s agent Muse had more than 10 million users last month, according to the company, which disclosed no count of paying subscribers or business-call activity. Any paid subscriber can now request business calls. Previously, only selected early adopters could try the function after asking Muse for access.

Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who heads its Superintelligence Labs division, said: “It could be used to take care of calls people don’t want to make.” His examples included a cable company, the DMV, and a restaurant without online reservations. The restaurant case exposes a practical limit: task completion still depends on the business accepting an AI caller.

Meta has not disclosed how many of the 10 million users pay. Calls remain unavailable to free users for now, the company said. The company frames business calling as another routine task moved from a user’s to-do list.

What does it cost?

Calls sit inside Muse’s subscription tiers rather than a separate phone plan. Meta lists two paid levels:

• Meta’s $20 monthly plan: 500 million Muse tokens each week, equivalent to $240 a year.
• Meta’s $100 monthly plan: 3 billion tokens each week, equivalent to $1,200 a year, for heavier users.

Neither plan sets a call allowance, so the announcement leaves the metered cost of a long or repeated interaction unspecified for subscribers at either price. The announcement specifies no separate call minutes and gives no token charge for a typical business call. Calls remain confined to paid subscribers for the time being.

How credible is the business-call promise?

Meta does not operate alone in business calling. The startup Instinct and Google’s Gemini already offer similar options, according to the source’s comparison. The comparison names no versions, prices, call volumes, or success rates for either rival.

Meta’s 10 million-user figure measures adoption, not verified call completion, error handling, disclosure compliance, or business satisfaction across its consumer product and paid calling service. The source says the tools can handle calls, but capability does not guarantee business acceptance. Meta supplied no measured Muse hang-up rate, completed-call rate, or customer-service resolution rate.

Reception remains uneven. Many businesses and receptionists hang up once they identify that an AI agent, rather than a human, is calling. Better simulation of a human voice will make that distinction harder to detect, the source cautions. Meta did not disclose whether Muse calls identify themselves as AI.

The announcement also omits verification rules for customer requests and data-handling terms for the businesses and consumers involved. Those gaps matter in a market where many recipients treat AI callers as unwanted rather than as a new service channel.

What changes for customer service?

Meta presents business calling as a practical answer to customer-service friction. The source describes consumers facing complex phone trees, prolonged holds, and transfers to other departments. Meta’s pitch rests on the agent’s unlimited patience with a tedious task, not a promise of faster staff deployment at the business.

For businesses, value depends on agent disclosure, authentication, and whether reception staff treat an AI caller as a workflow problem rather than an unwanted interruption. Those operational questions remain unanswered in the announcement. A completed call would not necessarily mean the request succeeded, and a successful request could still end with the business refusing an AI caller.

Meta’s broader goal is to make consumer AI mainstream for everyday users, with calls removing another task from users’ to-do lists. The 10 million-user base gives the company distribution, but not evidence of commercial acceptance among U.S. businesses.

Calls remain paid-only for the time being. “The recently added option to make a Muse email address will soon roll out to free users,” Wang said this week. That newly added email option is separate from the $20 entry tier that currently carries calling access. The distinction leaves free users without business calls, even as Meta expands another Muse feature to them.

Until Meta reports completion rates, business response times, and paid conversion, the announcement establishes reach rather than proven service performance.