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

Ivan Mehta at TechCrunch reports that two of the loudest text-based AI agents—San Francisco’s Instinct and Meta’s Muse—both added outbound calling in the same news cycle. Instinct founder Noah Shinn announced Instinct Concierge for high-touch cases: restaurants that don’t take online reservations, dentist cancellation lists, cable-bill fights. Early access now, broader rollout later.

Meta’s Muse likewise gained the ability to place calls to U.S. businesses, rolling first to users who had asked Muse to make a call—Meta’s ask-to-unlock pattern for new features. Rivals had been using calling as a wedge against Instinct; that wedge just closed.

The money and traction around these agents is already outsized. Instinct raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation last month and is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Sensor Tower figures cited in the piece put Muse at over 730,000 U.S. downloads in its first stretch, beating Meta AI’s early post-launch tally and briefly hitting No. 2 on the charts.

We’re glad the agents are leaving the chat box. We’re watching who they pretend to be on the phone.

Calling is the right product move if these systems are going to be useful. A huge share of life still runs through phone trees, hold music, and businesses that never built a clean API. Letting an agent book the table or negotiate the bill is the kind of mundane leverage that makes AI feel like a tool instead of a demo. Instinct’s email addresses for sign-ups, plus assistant-to-assistant contact via a trusted network, push the same direction: agents that operate across surfaces, not just reply in an app.

The parity race is the tell. When Muse and Instinct ship the same capability within a day of each other, calling stops being differentiation and becomes table stakes. That’s good for users; it compresses the feature gap. It’s also how agent products start to look like commodity wrappers on similar model stacks—with brand, distribution, and trust doing the real work. Meta’s distribution advantage is obvious. Instinct’s valuation chatter says investors think a focused agent company can still clear a huge number.

The downside is consent and impersonation. An agent that can call a dentist or a cable company is one step from sounding like you without you on the line. Businesses will need ways to know they’re talking to software. Users will need clear logs, confirmation gates, and kill switches when Concierge goes off-script. I’m not against the feature—I’m against silent automation that burns trust at the restaurant hostess stand.

Useful AI here means agents that take tedious coordination off humans’ plates. The trajectory if this scales without disclosure norms: spam with better manners, and a phone channel that gets harder for real people to navigate. Ship the calls; ship the receipts.

Text-based assistants—Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Muse—are competing hard for daily tasks. Muse launched last week; Instinct has been among the most visible, drawing heavy investor interest at the reported $10 billion valuation talks.