Meta opened up its Muse AI agent to people who want to build their own hardware around it. The new Muse Gadgets project ships open-source firmware and a device SDK, which means a tinkerer with a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 board can put the agent on a DIY screen, a bedside speaker or anything else with buttons, sensors and actuators attached. The firmware and SDK carry an Apache 2.0 license, with a handful of third-party components keeping their upstream licenses.
Alongside the kit, Meta showed what it has built itself: the Muse Home Link, a small USB-C device that connects Muse to a home network so the agent can talk to smart TVs, speakers and anything else exposing an interface, including hardware the owner builds with a local HTTP API. The Home Link is free for US Muse subscribers while supplies last.
What Muse is and why hardware matters
Muse is Meta’s personal AI agent, launched to book travel, fill out forms and shop on a user’s behalf. It moved fast after launch. TechCrunch reported that Muse adoption is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile numbers, and Meta’s hardware-around-agent strategy is getting more concrete by the week, from the puck-shaped Muse Charm, its first dedicated device, to the new open-source side door for builders.
The open framework gives developers room to attach Muse to displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, whatever sits on a workbench. Meta’s project page lists a few starter ideas, including an e-ink display for the agent, or an HDMI dongle version that plugs into a TV. Nothing in the launch locks builders into Meta’s own device lineup, which is unusual for a company that usually wants people on its own hardware.
Meta’s own gadget: Home Link
Meta’s Superintelligence Labs head Nat Friedman published the Home Link on X, describing a small USB-C device that connects Muse to the local network. It handles smart speakers, smart TVs and anything with an HTTPS endpoint, which covers most modern smart-home gear and any do-it-yourself hardware that speaks HTTP. It doubles as an example of what the open SDK can do, and as a product Meta hopes will seed a garage-hardware ecosystem the way Raspberry Pi did for single-board computing.
Why this launch is a strategy, not a gimmick
Building ambient hardware around an AI agent is where the big-platform competition is heading. OpenAI has hardware ambitions through its work with Jony Ive’s team, and Anthropic has talked openly about wanting an interface beyond the phone screen. The bet is that an agent that can act for you needs to be reachable without pulling out a phone and opening an app. Voice, always-on home devices and wearables are the natural form factors, because the agent does the typing and tapping on your behalf.
Meta has an advantage in shipping cheap hardware; it has done it at massive scale with Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. Opening the SDK to third-party builders multiplies the surface area of where Muse can appear without Meta financing every device. If even a handful of interesting DIY Muse gadgets catch on, they generate evidence about what people actually want from an agent in physical space, which is the kind of signal no product team can buy.
What the kit actually includes
Firmware, a Linux SDK and project templates are live on the Muse Gadgets site. The Apache 2.0 license carves out a few third-party pieces: a minimp3 header, a pixel font file from Adafruit GFX under BSD-2-Clause, ESP-IDF components pulled at build time, and the LVGL and SDL libraries used in the simulator. Meta notes the Jollybot avatar is not covered by the open license, so people who want to reuse that face need separate permission.
The choice of ESP32 and Raspberry Pi as reference hardware is pointed. Both are cheap, common and well documented, which is exactly what an open hardware ecosystem needs to get off the ground.builders will not need specialist tooling or expensive boards to get something working.
Businesses first,builders second
The Muse Gadgets launch fits into a bigger Meta push this week into non-consumer territory. Muse for Small Business, free with usage limits, connects the agent to Shopify, Dropbox and Slack, and Meta has formed a new business unit, Meta Enterprise Platform, to sell AI services to companies. Y Combinator-backed startups are building gadget-like agents for specific niches, so Meta wants Muse to be the platform layer underneath those products too. If Muse becomes the default agent businesses reach for, and the default platform tinkerers build on, Meta is playing both sides of the same market at once.
The timing is aggressive. Muse has momentum with consumers right now, and Meta is spending that momentum on developer goodwill and hardware mindshare before the next wave of agent products arrives from rivals. The饰品-style wearable business Meta has with Ray-Ban gives it a distribution channel that OpenAI and Anthropic currently lack, and Muse Gadgets extends that reach into the hobbyist and startup scene, which is where breakout form factors historically emerge.
What to watch next is whether any of the first wave of Muse Gadgets community builds get real traction, whether Meta’s own Home Link reaches enough homes to matter, and whether rivals respond with equally open SDKs for their own agents. Right now the open-source door is one Meta is holding open alone.