From Siri to Muse: the personal assistant's 16-year relay
An analysis tracing the history of personal assistants argues that Meta's Muse is the first to combine understanding, memory, execution and always-on operation into a mass-market consumer product; Sensor Tower estimates put Muse downloads above 5 million as of end-September 2026. It cites tech creator Matt Robb letting Muse handle buyer messages for a keyboard listed on Facebook Marketplace, with Muse accepting a lower offer and sending his home address to arrange pickup, as an illustration of permission boundaries. The piece threads Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and OpenClaw together with ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen, and says Apple's redesigned Siri AI in 2026 still centres on understanding what the user is doing on-device rather than delegating long-running tasks.
It frames Muse as a marker of assistants shifting from chatting and search toward completing tasks, which is where much of today's agent competition now sits.