What is Muse, and why did I switch?
I'm Ryan Walker. I run Avakata Agency in Wellington, Florida, and I've spent 26 years in digital marketing. I have tried every serious AI tool on the market, usually within a week of launch. Claude is excellent for building software and deep coding work. ChatGPT is good at quick answers but has always felt a little gimmicky to me. Buzz is promising, but it doesn't proactively do anything, and it freezes on me. Muse — Meta's personal AI assistant — is the first one that changed how my days actually work.
I never thought I'd say this about a Meta product: it is, by far, light years ahead of any AI assistant out there right now. And it's only been in my life a few weeks. I honestly can't imagine what it becomes once it integrates with everything.
What's the difference between a proactive assistant and a chatbot?
Every other assistant I've used requires prompts. You have to stop what you're doing, go to it, grant a pile of permissions, phrase the perfect request, and then babysit the result. Muse asks me questions. It reads my text messages and emails and proactively tells me something that just happened. It offers to help before I know I need help. It keeps my running files updated constantly, so I can glance at my feed and have total confidence that every task is tracked and done.
That's not a small UX difference. That's the difference between a tool and a chief of staff.
9 creative ways I actually use Muse every day
1. It customizes its own app for me
If I want a certain section of the app to have certain buttons — a reply button on this row, a call button on that one — it builds it. My entire open-work list became a single screen with a real action on every row: tap to call, tap to reply, tap to open the thing I need. No hunting through menus.
2. It watches my inbox and my texts so I don't have to
Muse reads my email and text messages and proactively surfaces what matters — a reply I've been waiting on, a deadline that just moved, a problem that just appeared. I don't go back and check threads anymore. It comes to me.
3. It never forgets anything
Every decision, deadline, and loose end goes into running files that it updates constantly. Weeks later, it still knows exactly where things stand — and it reminds me before something slips, not after.
4. It turns big projects into Notion workspaces
When a project gets elaborate, I tell Muse to connect it to Notion and build projects out of it — pages, databases, trackers — so I can work the project from there. I say it once, out loud, and it exists.
5. Email triage I never see
It sorts, searches, and drafts across my email so my inbox stops being a second job. The stuff that needs my voice gets staged for my approval. The rest just gets handled and logged.
6. It built a court-case file out of 15 years of messages
I asked it to pull together everything relevant to a legal matter. It searched text messages and emails going back roughly 15 years, found the threads, and assembled an organized file. Work that would have taken me days of digging took one conversation.
7. I talk; it builds the integrations
I can say, in plain words, "create an MCP and connect it to that program and pull in what I need" — and it does it. I don't set up credentials, I don't read API docs, I don't spend a Saturday wiring things together. This is how software should have always worked.
8. It made a phone call for me
This is the one I tell people about. I needed a call made to an office in West Palm Beach. Muse built a calling integration with open-source software, cloned my voice, placed the call, recorded the whole thing, and took care of it. That job would have taken me a day to set up and test in any other tool. Muse just did it.
9. It attacks the admin pile
Bills, disputes, callbacks, renewals — the admin firefighting that eats a business owner's week. Muse keeps every fight in one place, tells me what's waiting on me versus what's waiting on them, and drafts the words when I need them.
Muse vs. Claude vs. ChatGPT — my honest take
Claude is still my pick when the job is purely building software. ChatGPT is fine for a quick question, but it has never run a single thing in my life. Buzz has ideas, but it stalls and freezes when the work gets real. Muse is the only one that starts from "yes" — I have genuinely never hit a wall with it. It doesn't do the assistant thing where it politely explains why something can't be done. It finds the way, does the work, and reports back. For a business owner, that posture is everything.
Why this matters for small businesses
At Avakata, we build agentic workflows for clients, and the pattern is always the same: the businesses that win aren't the ones with the smartest chatbot on their website. They're the ones whose operations quietly handle themselves — leads followed up, inboxes triaged, files updated, nothing forgotten. A proactive assistant is that pattern, personal-sized. If one person with an assistant like this can run the workload of a small team, imagine a company where every workflow works this way. That's the work we do, and it's why I wrote this.
Frequently asked questions
Is Muse better than ChatGPT?
For my work, yes — decisively. ChatGPT answers questions. Muse takes action: it monitors my messages, updates my files, builds integrations, and follows up without being prompted. If you need a chatbot, they're comparable. If you need an operator, it isn't close.
Is Muse better than Claude?
For coding, Claude is superb, and I still respect it as a builder. For running a business and a life — proactive follow-up, memory across everything, integrations on voice command — Muse is ahead. They solve different problems; only one of them runs my day.
What makes an AI assistant "proactive"?
Three things: it watches the inputs that matter (email, texts, files), it maintains memory without being asked, and it initiates — surfacing what changed, asking the right question, and staging the next action for your approval. Prompt-and-wait is not proactivity.
The bottom line
I run an agency, two kids' schedules, and about forty open threads at any given moment. Muse is the first assistant that made all of that feel handled instead of just documented. It's proactive, it never forgets, it builds what I ask for — including parts of itself — and it has never once frozen on me. If you're a business owner drowning in tools that all wait for the perfect prompt, this is the one that finally does the work.
Want this kind of leverage inside your own business? That's exactly what we build at Avakata. See how agentic workflows work, or start a project with us.