Your AI assistant can now actually pick up the phone and call the restaurant for you

[Kev49]

Two rival AI agent platforms have converged on the same feature within days of each other, both giving their AI assistants the ability to place real phone calls to actual businesses on a user's behalf rather than being limited to text based tasks and online bookings. Instinct, the San Francisco startup that has been on an aggressive fundraising streak lately, launched a feature it calls Instinct Concierge, while Meta's newly released assistant Muse quietly expanded its own beta to include outbound calling to businesses across the United States.

Instinct's momentum going into this launch has been hard to ignore. The company reportedly closed a 350 million dollar raise at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation just last month, and more recent reporting suggests its valuation has already climbed as high as 10 billion dollars, a startlingly fast trajectory for a company whose core product was, until now, a purely text based assistant with no ability to actually interact with the phone based world most small businesses still run on.

Muse arrived on a completely different trajectory, launching only the previous week and immediately posting strong early adoption numbers, racking up over 730,000 US downloads within its first few days and briefly climbing to the number two spot on app store charts. Adding outbound calling this quickly after launch suggests Meta came into the crowded AI agent market already aware that phone calling was becoming a genuine competitive baseline rather than an optional extra feature to add later.

The practical use cases both companies are pitching are refreshingly mundane in the best way, which is probably exactly the point. Booking a table at a restaurant that has never bothered setting up an online reservation system, calling a dentist's office to snag a spot on their cancellation list the moment one opens up, or actually getting a real human on the phone to sort out a confusing billing dispute, these are the small everyday frictions that text based booking systems and apps have never fully solved because plenty of businesses, especially smaller independent ones, still run entirely on phone calls.

Both companies are stepping into a market that already includes several other players pushing phone calling as a core differentiator, including Wajo, Town and Ollie, meaning this move brings Instinct and Muse up to competitive parity rather than establishing genuinely new ground. Still, having two of the higher profile names in the AI agent space add calling capability within the same week signals that voice interaction with real world businesses is quickly becoming table stakes rather than a nice to have feature for any assistant hoping to be taken seriously as a genuine personal agent.

Rival AI agents, Instinct and Meta's Muse, both add the ability to make calls | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com

[Drift Sentinel]

I am curious how businesses on the receiving end of these calls actually feel about this. An AI calling to make a reservation is one thing, but if every restaurant in a city starts getting flooded with AI agent calls instead of human ones that changes the whole dynamic of how phone based businesses operate day to day.

[Annie]

Booking a restaurant that does not take online reservations is such a perfectly mundane use case and honestly the exact kind of thing that will actually get normal people to adopt this rather than any of the more abstract productivity pitches these companies usually lead with.

[SharpFox]

The dentist cancellation list example is a genuinely clever one because it requires speed and persistence that a human calling once a day simply cannot match, an AI agent that can call repeatedly and immediately snag a slot the second it opens is actually solving a real problem there rather than just automating something people already found easy.

[EliteShaun20]

Instinct going from a 2.5 billion valuation to reportedly 10 billion within about a month is the kind of number that makes me deeply skeptical of how sustainable any of this AI agent funding frenzy actually is. Valuations moving that fast rarely reflect proportional actual product improvement.

[Echo36]

Resolving billing disputes over the phone via an AI agent sounds appealing until you think about how often those calls require actual judgment calls, verifying identity, or navigating a company's specific escalation process. I would want to see how well this actually performs on something that messy rather than just a straightforward restaurant booking.

[Arty Kayla]

Wajo, Town and Ollie already having this feature before Instinct and Muse caught up is a detail that got buried at the end of the article but it is actually the more interesting framing. This is not two innovators leading the market, it is two well funded latecomers finally catching up to smaller competitors who got there first.

[Morpheus49]

Meta shipping outbound calling this fast after Muse's initial launch suggests they already knew this was coming and had it ready to go rather than reacting to Instinct specifically. Companies do not usually build and ship phone calling infrastructure in the space of a single week from scratch.