Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is selling the Muse Charm, a pocket AI companion styled after a Tamagotchi. The Verge writer built a similar device for about $50 using a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75-inch touchscreen board, which Meta lists as an official starting point for "Muse Gadgets" that connect to its Muse AI cloud.
The writer says the stock setup was limited. Muse first treated voice input as audio clips to transcribe, responses were slow, and answers appeared as a few words at a time on screen. The build also shipped with a single avatar and did not detect smart home devices. The writer used Claude Code, with no prior coding experience, to add a conversation history page, a text-to-speech voice from ElevenLabs, a remote camera shutter over Bluetooth, multiple avatars, a pet-care minigame, a working pocket watch face, and a video player.
The writer says they cannot judge the code's quality and does not trust Meta or the Muse agent with email or home network access, so they put the device on guest Wi-Fi. The writer also notes that a Meta reviewer's home address was reportedly leaked through the Muse agent.