I read Meta’s latest Muse announcement over coffee this morning, and the hardware didn’t hold my attention for long. There are new agent features, a Tamagotchi-like wearable built for Muse, and a pair of AI glasses with no camera at all. What I kept thinking about was my invoices. The whole pitch for an agent you wear is that it does things for you, and most of the things I need done sit behind logins that no pendant has ever seen. So I want to walk through one plain comparison: Muse on a wearable versus an AI browser agent in the side panel of the Chrome I’m already signed into.

I like the wearable idea more than I expected to. A small device that nags you about your day is kind of charming. But charm doesn’t get you into an accounting portal.

Three errands, walked both ways

Say it’s a boring Tuesday. I need to move a hotel booking by one day, download last month’s invoice from a vendor’s billing portal, and answer a support ticket that has been sitting in our helpdesk since Friday.

With Muse, each request starts as speech on a device and goes to Meta’s servers, where the model works out what I meant. That part is fine. Then it has to actually touch the hotel, the vendor, and the helpdesk, and that takes a connector of some kind: an OAuth grant, an integration Meta or a partner built, or a public API the service happens to offer. The hotel chain might have one. The vendor portal almost certainly doesn’t, because it’s a creaky PHP app from 2014 that emails you a PDF if you click the right button twice. The helpdesk would want an admin to approve a third-party app before Muse could read a single ticket. At most companies that means filing an IT request and waiting a week while someone in security decides whether a Meta connector belongs anywhere near customer data.

In the browser, the same three errands look like this:

  • The booking. I’m already on the hotel’s site and signed in to my loyalty account. The agent reads the reservation page and changes the date in the same form I would have used.
  • The invoice. The vendor tab is open with its session cookie. The agent clicks through to billing and downloads the file.
  • The ticket. The helpdesk is open in another tab. The agent reads the thread, drafts a reply in the reply box, and I press send.

None of those needs a connector. The only integration is that I logged in last week and Chrome remembered.

Where does the invoice actually go?

With Muse, the request, the context, and whatever the connector sends back all pass through Meta’s infrastructure. The connector also holds a token to your account, stored somewhere you don’t control, and that token stays live long after the errand is done.

A browser agent reads the page inside your browser. Some of that text still goes to a model, of course. In Dassi you pick which model. You can log in with your ChatGPT subscription or bring your own key for Claude, Gemini, or something else, so the invoice text goes to the provider you chose and not through a middleman. There’s no long-lived token sitting on someone else’s server waiting to be breached. I went through the routing in more detail in AI Browser Safety: What Gets Sent Where.

I don’t know how Meta plans to handle work accounts. Maybe an enterprise version is coming. The announcement didn’t say much about it, and I’d rather not guess.

Connectors, briefly

Every connector is someone else promising to keep your access working. Some keep that promise. Others break quietly on a Thursday, and you find out when the agent tells you it “couldn’t complete the request.”

What the side panel reaches, and what it can’t

The side panel can reach exactly what you can reach. That’s both its main strength and its limit.

It gets past your company’s Okta screen because you already did. It can use the internal tool the ops team built in 2019 that has no documentation, the Google Sheet someone shared with you and nobody else, and the ugly vendor portal. It works because it runs in your session, with your cookies and permissions. Nobody had to build it an integration. If your session has expired, it hits the same login screen you would, and you log in again the usual way. It won’t guess a password, and I prefer that.

It also can’t be in two places at once. If the tab isn’t open and the laptop is closed, nothing happens. That leads to the real weakness of the browser approach.

Away from your desk, Muse wins

A browser agent isn’t with you when you’re away from your desk. I’d rather say that plainly than bury it. If I’m in an airport security line and remember the hotel date is wrong, Muse on my wrist can take the request right then. My browser agent is on a laptop in my bag, doing nothing. For quick, fleeting moments like that, the wearable is simply better, and a Chrome extension can’t change the fact that Chrome is on a desk.

I wrote a while ago that Apple’s AI wearables miss the point, and I still think the execution layer belongs where the logins are. But the capture layer is a separate question. Maybe the sensible setup is a pendant that records the errand and a browser that carries it out once you’re back at your desk. Nobody I know of has connected those two cleanly yet, and I can’t tell whether Meta even wants to, since its version of the connection runs through Meta’s servers.

Until then, my Tamagotchi can remind me that the invoice exists. That’s roughly what the original Tamagotchi did too, except it wanted you to clean up after it.