I built an AI Tamagotchi before Meta could

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From the original article

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

But I won’t be buying one, because we have Muse Charm at home. It cost just $50, and I’ve decided the learning experience was worth it.

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

Or at least it can if you inject a lot of extra vibe code.

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

When the silver metal pocket watch arrived, it felt pretty useless to start. Setup was easy enough — I just plugged it into my PC and pointed Claude at Meta’s GitHub, then paired it to the Muse phone app. But even after I put Meta’s keys on the device, Muse originally thought I was sending it audio clips to transcribe rather than commands.

After I cleared that up, Muse’s responses were still slow, and it didn’t answer me out loud. It was hard to tell what it was saying since it only showed a few words onscreen at a time, with no place to read full messages unless I whipped out my phone with its own Muse app.