We have Muse Charm at home.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta made AI so cute by giving it a little squishy face — and this holiday season, he wants to sell you a Muse Charm so you can carry around your cheerful AI helper like a Tamagotchi.

But I won’t buy any, because we have Muse Charm at home. It only cost $50 and I decided the learning experience was worth it.

My version doesn’t have cameras or 5G cellular radio, but it really talks to Muse and has cute avatars too! It doubles as a pocket watch and remote camera viewfinder, and it can (theoretically) control my smart home.

Or at least it’s possible if you inject a lot of extra ambiance code.

A few weeks ago, I paid $50 to get a 1.75-inch touchscreen computer pendant shipped from China, specifically the Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C. Not only does the push-to-talk AI SDK look like a plot like the Muse Charm, but it is officially sanctioned by Meta. This is one of the company’s first suggestions if you want to create a “Muse Gadget,” a device that uses Meta’s open source code and tokens to connect directly to its Muse AI cloud.

When the silver-plated pocket watch arrived, there seemed no point in starting. The setup was pretty simple: I simply plugged it into my PC and pointed Claude at Meta’s GitHub, then paired it with the Muse phone app. But even after putting Meta’s keys on the device, Muse initially thought I was sending him audio clips. transcribe rather than commands. After clarifying this, Muse’s responses were still slow and she didn’t respond to me out loud. It was hard to tell what it was saying because it only displayed a few words on the screen at a time, with no place to read the full messages unless I pulled out my phone with its own Muse app.

Meta’s version also only came with a single Jolly avatar that mostly just sat there and looked cute, and it wouldn’t automatically discover smart home gadgets like the Amazon Echo or Google Home devices do. (This gadget really didn’t do Nothing useful after my initial installation.) And although Meta AI software engineers Anant Narayanan and Jeremy Payne include an interesting example application showing how Muse Gadgets can stream video from your phone’s camera, the lack of a remote shutter button made it less useful for taking photos.

But a few Claude Code sessions filled almost all of these holes. All I had to do was plug the Waveshare back into my PC and then have Claude reprogram every single thing I wanted.

When I complained to Claude about not being able to properly read or hear Muse’s responses to my requests, issues that others have also mentioned, Claude created a conversation history page so I could swipe right to read what she was saying, and I plugged in a British AI voice from ElevenLabs that speaks her responses out loud. (The voice acting was the least sucky of those in the free tier of ElevenLabs, my wife and I agree, although it doesn’t at all fit the cuddly vibe of Muse’s avatars.)

Thanks to Claude, I can now press a button for my phone to take a photo from across the room with a high-quality live preview, and my phone’s front camera no longer appears upside down. Claude also did a pretty quick job of adding a low-quality camera preview via Bluetooth, so I don’t need to be connected to home Wi-Fi to get photos from creative angles.

I had Claude create a whole batch of different avatars like the ones Meta showed at Meta Connect, and add a Tamagotchi-like mini-game where they need food, play, sleep, and a bath. When the game seemed too simple to capture attention, I asked him to add four different levels of hunger, boredom, and filth. I decided that the treats should create a crunchy mess and make the avatars dirty when they eat them, and that too much play should tire out a pet. My wish was Claude’s order.

When I noticed that I accidentally let go of the Push-to-Talk button too soon and Muse was choking on near-empty audio, Ambience Coding fixed it a few minutes later by only sending audio over a one-second duration. The only obvious lag I see now is from Meta’s own servers – sometimes they’re responsive, sometimes they’re a little laggy.

It was so easy to let Claude reprogram the pendant that I asked him to create a few features specifically for this video of this story, including a working three-hand pocket watch face that actually tells the time. (It took 15 minutes; now when I say the hardware looks like a pocket watch, you can see what I mean!) He even found, downloaded, cut and loaded video clips of Zuck introducing the Muse Charm and installed a video player so I could play those clips on the Waveshare.

I want you to understand that I have no coding experience so I don’t know if any of these codes are good. This could be fatally wrong. I also don’t trust Meta or its agent Muse with my email or home network, especially after learning how they leaked a reviewer’s home address. (I put it on guest Wi-Fi from the start as a precaution.)

That means I don’t do it Really know how useful or not a Muse charm may be for those who TO DO know how to code and are ready to take a bigger leap of faith. But after nearly dropping a bulky little silver pendant on several occasions, one with no more Muse functionality than my phone (and slightly less without extra code), I think Muse in itself is not the reason to buy a dedicated computer pocket watch.

The reason for having dedicated hardware is to do things you can’t do on the phone that’s already in your pocket, like coding the entire gadget to do what you want. Which makes me wonder: will the real Muse Charm be as freely programmable, or would the kind of people who buy one be better off with a development kit? I guess we’ll see when it ships.