By Katie Paul
NEW YORK, Sept 22 (Reuters) – Meta has been testing a “human concierge” for its new personal AI assistant, Muse, which entails having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed via the digital agent, according to internal company posts seen by Reuters.
The Facebook and Instagram owner told employees about the test last week, shortly after the company publicly launched a phone calling feature for Muse.
Some employees have raised privacy concerns about humans handling those calls, warning that the approach could result in sensitive information being shared unintentionally with contractors in call centers, the posts showed.
In response, a vice president in Meta’s SuperIntelligence Labs unit acknowledged in one of those posts that “it was a miss” to start testing the contractor-placed calls without proper disclosures and said the company had “rolled back this feature” for now.
Meta was still “hillclimbing AI calling,” she added, noting that some tests indicated having humans make the calls could get their success rate up to the 95% to 98% range, instead of the “lower percentage of AI calling.”
HUMAN LABOR BEHIND AI PROMISES
The Muse test offers a window into how tech companies sometimes rely on human labor behind the scenes to deliver on the promises of autonomous AI, as they bump up against reluctance to engage from those on the receiving end of the robocalls.
It harks back to an earlier experiment Meta conducted a decade ago, when the company, then known as Facebook, trialed a digital assistant called “M” in its Messenger service. Media reports later estimated that around 70% of the agent’s tasks were actually carried out by humans.
Asked about the Muse “human concierge” plan, a Meta spokesperson said the response from employees has been “overwhelmingly positive” and that the purpose of the test was to “get feedback so we can implement safety and privacy protections and improve features before we release them publicly.”
“We’re working with merchants to continue improving this potential calling feature, and will only roll it out when it’s ready and with the proper disclosures,” said the spokesperson, Daniel Roberts.
MUSE APP LEADS US DOWNLOADS
Meta’s Muse agent has topped US app download charts in the two weeks since its debut, with more than 2.5 million downloads, according to data provided by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
The centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to supply “personal superintelligence” to the billions of people who use Meta’s services daily, the AI bot can autonomously perform tasks like sending emails, shopping and booking travel on a person’s behalf.
Meta heavily emphasized the AI assistant’s safety protections during its launch, telling would-be users that each agent would have its own secure “virtual machine,” or a dedicated computer in the cloud designed to keep people’s sessions isolated, and would keep sensitive information like passwords in separate secure storage.
With the phone calling feature, a Muse user can tell the agent to dial phone numbers for US businesses and talk with people on the other end to handle errands like booking haircuts, checking whether a store has an item in stock and getting quotes from different contractors.
After the call, the agent provides a summary and transcript of the exchange in the Muse app.
Meta began having employees test out, or “dogfood,” the phone calling capability in August and gradually started rolling it out to Muse users in the days after the app’s debut, the internal posts showed.
It enabled the human concierge feature, also referred to as “human agent calls,” for half of Meta’s employees last week, according to the post announcing the feature to employees.
“Muse is now able to hand requests to a trained agent, who places the call and works it through,” the post said.
Employees who did not want to be included could join an opt-out group, according to the post.
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York, Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)
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