Text-based AI assistants are a hot market, with Instinct, Wajo, Town, Ollie, and Meta’s Muse agents, released last week, competing for your attention and tasks. San Francisco-based Instinct is one of the most popular companies and has attracted huge investor interest. The valuation is reportedly $10 billion.
Instinct has a new calling feature that allows agents to make calls and act as a concierge, which could make Instinct even more popular. Meta’s Muse, another strong contender for this fight, did the same.
Instinct founder Noah Shinn announced on X that the buzzy startup’s new calling feature, Instinct Concierge, can do things like make reservations at restaurants that don’t accept online reservations, put you on a dentist’s cancellation list, and solve problems with your cable bill. He said the feature is rolling out in early access to some users and will expand to all users in due course.
Instinct is shipping quickly, and Meta’s Muse AI assistant is catching up. It also just gained the ability to call U.S. companies. The tech giant said the feature will first be rolled out to users who have asked Muse to make a call. (This essentially acts as a feature request mechanism, Meta said, so that whenever Muse releases a new feature, it will be available first to users who contact Muse about it.)
These calling features came as many rivals were touting their calling features as better than Instinct. But with the rollout of Instinct’s concierge feature, everything is now equal in this regard.
Last week, Instinct also released an email address that allows Instinct to handle account sign-up and management. The company also added users to its trusted network, allowing their assistants to contact other people’s assistants to manage specific tasks.
Both Instinct and Muse have received a lot of attention in recent weeks. Instinct raised $350 million last month at a $2.5 billion valuation and is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, with investors showing strong interest in a text-based assistant that can navigate a user’s various screens.
Analytics firm Sensor Tower noted that Muse’s growth outpaced the release of the Meta AI app in the first few days. The app has garnered more than 730,000 downloads in the US, while the Meta AI app was downloaded 707,000 times in the first five days of release. At one point, this app was ranked number 2 on the top charts.
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