Image credit: Suzanne Kantra/Techlicious generated by ChatGPT
Facebook's owner, Meta, is testing whether human phone workers, not artificial intelligence, handle the phone calls placed by its new AI assistant, Muse, according to internal company posts reviewed by Reuters.
If you've asked Muse to call a salon for an appointment or check whether a store has something in stock, the voice working through that errand may not have been the AI at all. Meta calls the setup a "human concierge," meaning a trained employee in a call center can pick up the request and place the call themselves.
This matters because Muse sold itself as an AI that handles these errands on its own. Meta launched Muse two weeks ago as an assistant that can send emails, shop, and book travel for you. Meta also promised strong privacy protections, including a separate secure computer session for each user and locked-down storage for passwords.
None of that protects you from a stranger in a call center standing in for the AI on your call. According to Reuters, Meta's employees have raised that concern internally, warning that sensitive details could end up in the hands of contractors.
So far, Meta claims to have only turned the human concierge feature on for half its employees, who were testing the phone-calling feature before it went public. Those employees could opt out of having a person handle their calls. Regular Muse users testing the public phone feature don't currently get that same choice, and Meta hasn't said whether or when they will.
A Meta spokesperson, Daniel Roberts, told Reuters that employee feedback on the test has been "overwhelmingly positive" and that the company is using it to build in privacy protections before rolling anything out to the public. Meta says it won't launch the human concierge feature broadly until it's ready, and only "with the proper disclosures."
Requiring a live person standing by to finish calls the AI can't handle on its own suggests Muse may not be ready to do the very thing it was launched to do. And even when a company gives you the choice to opt in to a human handling your call instead of an AI, as Meta did for its employees, that's a big privacy trade-off many people may not fully understand.
