I asked Muse to help with our anniversary weekend in New York. It researched and booked four different reservations, saving me from traipsing through a zillion websites.
Its user interface is genuinely enjoyable to use, with a personalized avatar and non-cringey emojis.
Setting up Muse was night and day to OpenClaw and Hermes. Instead of running PowerShell commands and chasing down API keys, I clicked a few buttons and was running in 5 minutes.
It’s confounding how far behind Google is in the personal assistant race. With Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Maps, Chrome, Search, Android, and Gemini, Google has every advantage in the book. This battle is Google’s to lose, and they are fumbling it away.
Google’s still in the game. You know those “Sign in with Google” buttons? “Continue with Facebook” launched first, but Google dominates the market with 1.85 million websites to Facebook’s 111,000. A big reason Facebook lost is the trust crisis following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
People don’t like giving Meta access to their personal data. Muse has reportedly asked users for drivers license, bank account numbers, and snooped into messages without permission. For my test, I reluctantly gave it access to my Gmail, calendar, and OpenTable accounts.
If Google launches a real assistant, I’d switch in a hot second. (Admittedly, as an ex-Googler I’m an easy sell)
But they’d better get on with it.