Meta Opens Its Muse AI Agent to Homemade Hardware

Meta has opened the hardware side of its personal AI agent, Muse, to outside developers, publishing open-source firmware and a software kit that let hobbyists build their own devices around the assistant. The company also began distributing a small adapter, called Muse Home Link, that connects Muse to smart-home equipment such as televisions and speakers.

The release, posted October 1 and covered within hours by technology outlets, gives developers outside Meta a way to build physical interfaces for Muse beyond the company's own phone apps, smart glasses and the pendant-style Muse Charm device unveiled last month. Meta published the project's source code under the Apache 2.0 license through its Facebook Incubator organization on GitHub, alongside a new developer hub that lists supported hardware and starter projects.

What was released

The kit, called Muse Gadgets, is split into two pieces: firmware for ESP32 microcontroller boards, which cost a few dollars and are common among electronics hobbyists, and a Linux software development kit for single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi. Either path lets a device send requests to Muse and receive responses that can drive a screen, speaker, button or sensor. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs and the former chief executive of GitHub, announced the release on the social platform X, describing it as a way for developers to make hardware devices that work with Muse.

Meta's own reference design for the program is Home Link, a USB-C powered dongle that joins a home network and relays commands from Muse to compatible smart-home gear.

"A little usb-c powered device that allows Muse to connect to your home network to talk to smart home devices like TVs and speakers," Friedman wrote of the accessory.

The numbers

Meta manufactured 5,000 Home Link units and is giving them away, one per account, to subscribers in the United States while supplies last, with shipments expected within weeks. The developer hub highlights several recommended boards among its example projects, ranging from simple status lights to small kiosks:

• Raspberry Pi 5, running the Linux SDK
• Waveshare ESP32-S3 AMOLED touchscreen board
• M5Stack StickS3, a pocket-sized ESP32 device
• Seeed reTerminal E1002, with an e-ink display

A companion Discord server for the project has drawn roughly 100 members, where Meta says it will feature community projects submitted through a dedicated channel. Pairing a homemade device requires enabling "developer mode" inside the Muse app's device settings on iOS or Android.

Three weeks into a new product

Muse itself is barely a month old. Meta introduced the assistant on September 8 as a subscription AI agent that can send emails, book travel, fill out forms and make purchases on a user's behalf, running each account inside an isolated virtual machine that Meta says keeps the agent from directly accessing stored passwords or payment credentials. Pricing includes a limited free tier plus Power and Max subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month. Meta followed the consumer launch with a small-business version integrating Shopify, Dropbox and Slack, and with Muse Charm, a palm-sized pendant demonstrated at the company's Connect conference that is meant to give people access to the agent without a phone; Meta has said Charm will ship by the December holidays.

The push into personal AI agents follows a difficult stretch for Meta's consumer businesses. In August the company agreed to pay up to $18 billion over a decade to settle claims brought by attorneys general in dozens of states that it built Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to young users, the largest state consumer-protection settlement in the country outside the tobacco industry. Muse arrived into that environment as Meta's bid to compete with agent products from OpenAI and Anthropic and with the independent startup OpenClaw, whose approach Friedman has acknowledged shaped Muse's design.

Who is affected

The gadget kits are aimed squarely at hobbyists and small hardware makers rather than Meta's core consumer audience, but the stakes extend further. Smart-home device makers now have a defined, if informal, path to interoperate with one of the larger AI-agent platforms without negotiating a partnership, similar to how early smart-speaker development kits from Amazon and Google seeded ecosystems around Alexa and Assistant. Accessory and board manufacturers on Meta's recommended list, including Raspberry Pi, Waveshare, M5Stack and Seeed, stand to see a bump in interest from builders experimenting with Muse. The open release also matters to security researchers and privacy advocates, since any device running Muse's client code becomes a new entry point into an account that already has access to a user's email, calendar and payment methods, and now, through Home Link, networked speakers and televisions.

What happens next

Meta has not said how long the Home Link giveaway will last or whether it will manufacture more units once the initial run is gone, and the company has not announced pricing for the device or a timeline for international availability; both remain limited to the United States for now. TechCrunch reported that Meta plans to feature community-built projects on its official gadgets page, while Engadget's account of the release noted the kits arrive weeks before Muse Charm's promised holiday shipping date, setting up a stretch in which Meta will be supporting homemade gadgets, a first-party pendant and its existing phone and glasses integrations at the same time. Unite.AI's coverage framed the open-source move as part of a broader pattern of Meta shipping developer tooling ahead of its own flagship hardware, a sequencing that will be tested as Charm's December deadline approaches alongside whatever the hobbyist community builds in the meantime.