Instinct and Meta's Muse add phone calling the same day — a Concierge early access here, a request-gated beta there

“AI agents are actually making phone calls now — Instinct shipped Concierge and Meta's Muse expanded its outbound-call beta the same day, and both are still gated.”

Usable claims

• Two rival AI assistants added phone calling the same week, per TechCrunch's Thursday report (Ivan Mehta, 6:46 AM PDT, September 17, 2026). The market frame, the report's words: 'Text-based AI assistants are a hot market, with Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta's Muse agent, which launched last week , vying for users' attention and tasks.' Instinct's move: 'it's added a new calling feature that lets your agent place calls and act as a concierge.' Per the report, 'Instinct's founder Noah Shinn announced on X that the buzzy startup's new calling feature, Instinct Concierge, can do things like book restaurants that don't take online reservations, get on your dentist's cancellation list, or sort out problems with your cable bill.' — that use-case list is the article's paraphrase of the post. Rollout: 'The feature is rolling out in early access to some users, with plans to expand to all users in time, he said.' Shinn's X post, as embedded in the report (September 16, 2026): 'Your Instinct can now handle phone calls. Introducing Instinct Concierge – a white glove service meant to handle high-touch cases, such as making phone calls, high-end service booking, and more.' — the embed truncates the next sentence at 'get on…', so no further post text exists in this run's record. Muse's move: 'Though Instinct is shipping fast, Meta's Muse AI assistant is keeping up. It also just gained the ability to place calls to U.S. businesses.' The gating mechanics, the report's words: 'The tech giant said the feature will first roll out to users who ask Muse to make a call. (This essentially serves as a feature request mechanism, and Meta said that whenever Muse launches new features, they'll be available first to people who ask Muse about them.)' Fox's X post, as embedded (September 16, 2026): 'we just expanded the @Muse beta for outbound calls to US businesses, prioritizing folks who'd asked their Muse to let us know they wanted it first :)' […] 'phone calling was one of our top requests and your feedback helped make…' — the two spans are separated by one elided sentence of the post, and the embed's own ellipsis marks where the post text ends. The outlet's competitive read, its characterization: 'These calling features arrive as a number of rivals had been touting their ability to make calls as an advantage over Instinct; but with Instinct's Concierge feature rollout, they're all now in parity with each other on this front.' Instinct's site (opened this run) says the product is 'trained to use a phone and a computer. You can text or call it.' and is 'currently available to a private access group as we're scaling up compute' with waitlist or member-invite access. Muse's identity comes from Meta's own September 8 launch post: 'Muse is a personal AI agent. It doesn't just answer questions, it actually does the work.', rolling out 'in the US on iOS, Android, and muse.ai', and 'free for most of what people need, with subscription plans for people who want to do more.' Funding and traction, attributed: 'Instinct raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation last month', and it is 'reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation'; per 'Analytics firm Sensor Tower', Muse 'garnered over 730,000 downloads in the U.S.' versus the Meta AI app's '707,000 times post-launch in the first five days', and 'even reached the No. 2 position in the top charts at one point.'