From Siri to Meta Muse: a 15-year history of AI assistants
This 36Kr-republished feature frames 15 years of AI assistants as five eras: Siri (2011) understanding spoken commands, Amazon's Echo/Alexa (2014) making computing ambient in the home, Microsoft 365 Copilot (2023) bringing LLMs into knowledge work, OpenAI's Codex CLI (April 2025) taking on whole engineering tasks, and Meta's personal agent Muse, unveiled at Connect in September 2026, which aims to act on a user's long-term intent. It says Meta negotiated a Manus deal in late 2025 worth more than $2 billion that did not close after roughly half a year of review, and that Muse is meant to remember context, run in the background and extend into WhatsApp, Meta's social apps and AI glasses. The author also describes China's 2026 office-AI race — Tencent WorkBuddy, Alibaba's Qwen Office and ByteDance's Doubao Work — as shifting from "embedding" AI to "taking over" tasks, and cites OpenAI figures that Codex could run roughly 25-hour tasks producing about 30,000 lines of code by late 2025.
Placing Muse alongside Siri, Alexa, Copilot and Codex gives a useful frame for judging whether personal agents are a genuine new platform shift or another cycle of overhyped capability.