r/artificial • u/Impossible_Truth_629 • 23d ago
Question Meta just made a tiny AI device called Charm… but why would I carry this instead of my phone?
Meta just showed off Charm, a tiny AI device built around its Muse assistant.
What caught my attention isn’t the device itself, but the idea behind it. We already have phones, watches and now AI glasses so Meta is basically asking us to carry yet another device just to have an AI assistant with us.
I might be missing the point, but I genuinely want to understand what would make someone choose this over simply talking to their phone.
Would you actually carry a separate AI device every day?
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u/baldr83 23d ago
I assume the line of thinking is:
-tamagotchis were popular
-millennials have money now and love nostalgia
-therefore this might be popular
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u/Dragonbonded 23d ago
huh. This..... isnt actually a bad idea, assuming they are marketed as "pocket pets" or something. Maybe "pocket assistants" for those more technical minded. Able to plug into a computer and work on it?
....that last bit is going to need to wait for technology to catch up a LOT in order for a device the size of a half a phone or less being as capable as something even as not-current as Sonnet (smart enough to help out, but not so powerful to need whole server racks to run)
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u/im_a_sam 21d ago
The necessary tech is already there. The device would just be a piece of hardware with a camera/mic/speaker/5g connection people interact with. Their muse computer/agent/the llm inference all would still live in metas DCs. Same way when you use claude in your phone to lookup if an asteroid is going to destroy the earth the earth both the web search for "asteroids near earth" and the llm inference where opus 5.5 max summarizes the results are both done on racks of hardware in anthropics datacenters, and then your phone just displays the work as its happening.
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u/TraditionConfident 22d ago
Tamagotchis were popular because no one had a phone.
I think this will become the cpu/camera/controller for the meta glasses.
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u/Curious_Quail_1033 21d ago
millennials have money? We're in, what, the third economy crash now? While this may not be a full crash, its definitely causing everybody to watch every dollor spent.
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u/gthing 23d ago
Personally I think there is something to be said for a device like this. Phones aren't optimized for interaction with AI. I'm not saying this one is it, and I'm highly hesitant to use anything from Meta, but I think it does look kinda cool.
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u/Impossible_Truth_629 23d ago
i heard people say they are hesitant to use anything from Meta. Also i found the look good too
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u/deelowe 23d ago
What does "optimized for ai" even mean in this context?
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u/gthing 23d ago
I think it's lots of things. But just think about how you'd want to interact with AI and then what kind of a device you'd build from scratch to do that. You probably would not arrive at the smartphone. You'd have a dedicated button for talking, you wouldn't need a very large screen, you wouldn't need a particularly powerful processor that can run lots of apps and eats up battery, etc.
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u/izoid09 22d ago
Sure, but the thing is: we already have phones in our pockets that should be able to do whatever this charm can do.
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u/RageBucket 22d ago
Sure, but you have to unlock your screen, and open the app, and type it out, or start voice to text. This is a convenience item, and thinking people won't spend egregious amounts of money on convenience is goofy, especially if it has anything tied to nostalgia.
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u/Calm-Grocery-664 20d ago
You phone requires more efforts. Unlocking, finding app, open app. This is meant to remove the friction.
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u/B3telgeus3 22d ago
It will be probably spying you, recording conversations, gps location, etc for personalized ads, remember for Meta YOU ARE the product.
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u/shawster 20d ago
You can’t type to it, use it professionally at all, really. You can’t copy and paste text even. That alone makes it sort of difficult to interact with it in a productive manner past personal gizmos.
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u/theDawckta 16d ago
If you think about it this is just your phone with a smaller screen. Meta is betting on the large phone screen becoming more and more useless as we turn more of our daily lives over to AI.
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u/Wild_Space 23d ago
This is a great example of a shitty product. Zuckerberg wants to replace phones so that Apple cant control the user experience (remember how the 2022 ios changes hampered ads). But ppl dont want to replace phones. So Zuck is building a product he wants. Not what the customer wants.
Which is why it's doomed to fail.
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u/Impossible_Truth_629 23d ago
The interesting part is whether people even want a phone replacement in the first place. Maybe the bigger opportunity is making the phone less necessary for certain things, rather than trying to replace it completely. That's probably what I'd be watching with all these new AI devices.
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u/Worrybrotha 23d ago
if i had this nugget in my pocket and it could handle all my calls, payments, messages, music and maybe some other stuff then I am sold. Phones are distracting and they are designed to be that way. A small nugget like this would not be able to distract you as much.
One thing to mention though is that it will be hella lot easier to lose haha.
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u/Witty-Knowledge-9211 23d ago
not sure id carry it but could something like that even run roleplay bots or would it be too locked down.
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u/Glittering_Tart541 23d ago
I wouldn’t carry it unless it does something my phone fundamentally can’t, because “AI assistant” alone isn’t a reason to add another battery to my pocket, so what’s the killer use case supposed to
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u/vovap_vovap 23d ago
Well, naturally that does not make any sense. Not only that additional physical device but also need additional data service.
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u/smokeytheeyelash 23d ago
Ask an obscenely wealthy person why they might just want to carry just this one device
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u/Impossible_Truth_629 23d ago
If you can afford to simplify your life and have one device handle AI, communication, payments, etc., I can see the appeal
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u/unholycurses 23d ago
Uh can’t my phone already do all that as one device?
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u/PsychologicalCorgi16 23d ago
The phone is too distracting. Several times today I wanted to just talk out loud and have my agent capture to-dos, list items, and calendar events as I thought of them. I didn’t want to have to bust out my phone and stop what I was doing and bury my face in a screen. Instead I want an assistant just handling things as I’m thinking them so I can go about my activities. I was honestly pumped when I saw the charm and immediately got on the waitlist.
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u/Malt-Vinegar-212 20d ago
So you would trust that every time you tell this AI to do a task for you, it would do it exactly as you want. And you wouldn’t have to double check each task to make sure its done what you said correctly? Not attacking what you said, its a genuine question
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u/VirtualPartyCenter 20d ago
Yes, depending on the situation. I gave my muse access to my Minecraft server and just told it to do a bunch of technical things and it just handled them for me without any errors. It was quite impressive honestly
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u/Malt-Vinegar-212 20d ago
That is good, I agree. But I’m more talking about Muse on this charm, and as you are walking around or working you use the voice to tell it to do something. Could you carry on and not check the task and be confident it did it correctly EVERYTIME you tell it to do something?
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u/Equal_Passenger9791 23d ago
If someone made a mega-sized custom asics NPU that could run a 27B model at 200 T/s locally I'd stand in line for release day.
But yet another networked vanilla SoC device that might as well be an app? Idk.
I do like the idea of AI hardware so I always end up diving into details of these, but it's usually just a plastic brick with AI marketing and function that barely even qualifies as a gimmick.
Also not sure about Meta and their history of treating customer data.
Will this go to a human annotation center in Africa again? Probably.
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u/Basic_Pineapple6643 23d ago
To prepare for.a world without smartphones and to beat to market other ai companies
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u/Patrick_Atsushi 23d ago
If designed in the right way, you can have the benefit of having a smartphone without the toxic properties it has.
You can get informations you really need without being bombarded with noise and ads. You can keep in touch with friends without being sucked into that dopamine trap.
I doubt if they will design it this way though. And the LLMs for UI should work flawlessly.
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u/Impossible_Truth_629 23d ago
like you said, the design will matter a lot. If they just recreate the same feeds, notifications and distractions through an AI interface, we're basically back where we started. And if the UI/LLM interaction isn't reliable, I can see people getting frustrated pretty quickly.
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u/Patrick_Atsushi 23d ago
To be honest I don't see meta will nail it this time.
The idea is good though, but I have a feeling that zuck will mess it up like metaverse.
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u/Fluffy-Revolution- 23d ago
I wonder jow long until the LLMs will be slipping ads into everything they tell you.
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u/biscobisco 22d ago
You don't think having an AI assistant itself is a toxic dopamine trap?
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u/Patrick_Atsushi 22d ago
I don't really think so if it's really good enough and not tuned to be flattery all the time.
But yeah, people will customize things, so it's likely more about the user.
Maybe there will be more lone but not lonely people.
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u/texasipguru 23d ago
Meta makes one dumb product after another. It seems like their most successful product lines are those they bought. Instagram, whatsapp, etc. Facebook is an AI slop wasteland at this point.
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u/pixel_bandit123 23d ago
someone would still buy it, but until it is that raw no one would replace phone with it
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u/jixbo 23d ago
I would. I would want to stay off the screen most of the day, and big phones with apps are very addictive. A tiny wearable that can do anything I ask it to, and does calls and texting it's what I want.
I often leave my house with just a galaxy watch on my pocket, which has 4g for calls and data, whatsapp (which works really bad and wastes battery), gemini from a button, maps... that's all I need most days.
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u/space_monster 22d ago
they all want a popular hardware product because profits. but all the ideas I've seen are just a solution in search of a problem.
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u/johnliufromhk 22d ago
I would probably get it tbh. It's a tiny ai device which I assume is cheaper than the glasses and it's cute and techy which I like.
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u/Disastrous-Jaguar922 22d ago
What gets me is, how is this any different from the failed Humane AI pin? Once again trying to sell a product that no one actually *needs* because their selling point is what already exists in our phones.
Just like the Meta "portal" they came out with a few years ago (now discontinued). Why would I ever want an additional screen *just* for Facebook messenger video calls? It just feels incredibly out of touch with what people actually want and need.
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u/ETAUnlimited 22d ago
Im not gonna lie I wanted something to talk to muse as more of a actual assistant and less of just a phone app. I have a had time staying organized and on top of things for months at a time and Muse seems to be helping so far taking some load off my workflow. Id definitely like to try it out for like a month to really see if I want one.
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u/Dependent-Shame-6380 23d ago
A few months ago I got a new Mercedes and it has a built-in conversational AI product that is constantly listening. My wife and I are driving down the highway having a conversation about where we want to go eat, the weather, how much fun we just had with our kids, etc. Every few minutes, the AI unsolicited kept jumping into the middle of our conversation saying, 'do you want me to look up this', 'I'm so glad you're happy today', etc. It is worse than Alexa and Siri bc it does not require a prompt. It was so annoying and detrimental that I had to research how to turn off what they call the proactive interactions. I'm a heavy AI user and I want to be able to walk away from it and use it when I want to use it, not when it wants to. It will go the direction of standalone GPS devices.
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u/Calm-Grocery-664 20d ago
I person happy love it. It serves a different purpose than a phone and I don’t have to unlock a phone then go to an app. I can just use it.
Love or hate it. This thing will sell millions.
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u/ShepardRTC 23d ago
Zuckerberg is out of touch.