The Verge reviewer builds a $50 Meta Muse Charm alternative with Claude Code

Meta is preparing to sell the Muse Charm, a pocket AI assistant with a little face that resembles a Tamagotchi, in time for the holidays. The Verge reviewer Sean Hollister decided not to wait and built something similar himself. For $50, he ordered a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C touch pendant with a 1.75-inch screen from China, and Claude Code wrote all the missing functionality. The author has no programming experience, and he says up front that he cannot judge the quality of the resulting code, which may well be bad.

What the pendant can do out of the box

The choice of board was not random. The Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C is a push-to-talk dev kit that Meta itself names as one of the first options for building a "Muse Gadget." That is the company's term for devices that connect directly to the Muse AI cloud using Meta's open code and its tokens. Setup turned out to be simple: Hollister plugged the board into his PC, pointed Claude at Meta's GitHub and paired the device with the Muse app on his phone.

That did not make the gadget useful. At first, Muse treated the audio it received as files to transcribe rather than as commands. After a fix, replies still arrived slowly and were not spoken aloud. The screen held only a few words at a time, and the full text could be read only in the phone app. The single avatar, Jolly, just sat on the screen, and the pendant did not automatically discover smart devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home. An example from Meta engineers Anant Narayanan and Jeremy Payne shows how to stream video from the phone's camera, but it has no remote shutter button, so the pendant is nearly useless for taking photos.

What Claude Code added

A few sessions with Claude closed almost all of these gaps. For each one, the board was plugged back into the PC and the author simply described the change he wanted in words.

• Reading replies: a conversation history page, opened by swiping right.
• Voice: a British ElevenLabs voice from the free tier. The author and his wife found it the least unpleasant of the available options, although it does not fit the cute avatars.
• Camera: a button on the pendant takes a photo on the phone from across the room, with a high-quality live preview. The front camera no longer shows the image upside down. For shooting without home Wi-Fi, a low-quality preview over Bluetooth was added.
• Tamagotchi: a set of avatars modeled on those shown at Meta Connect, plus a mini-game in which the pet needs food, play, sleep and baths. For depth, Claude added four levels each of hunger, boredom and dirtiness: treats make the pet dirty, and too much play tires it out.
• Audio bug: Hollister sometimes released the button too early, and Muse received an almost empty clip. The fix took minutes: only audio longer than one second is sent to the server.
• Video: a pocket-watch face with three hands (15 minutes of work) and a video player with clips of Zuckerberg introducing the Muse Charm. Claude found, downloaded and trimmed the clips itself.

The only noticeable lag left is on the Meta server side: sometimes the servers respond quickly, and sometimes they slow down noticeably.

What this says about the real Muse Charm

The author does not trust Meta or the Muse agent with his email or his home network, especially after the story of the agent revealing the home address of one of the reviewers. For that reason, the pendant has been on guest Wi-Fi since day one.

Hollister's main conclusion is practical. After several near-drops of the heavy silver pendant, he decided that Muse by itself is not a reason to buy a separate device: it can do no more than the phone in your pocket, and without the added code, even less. The point of dedicated hardware is to do what a phone cannot, such as letting you program the whole gadget to your own taste.

It remains an open question whether the retail Muse Charm will be as freely programmable. If it is not, people willing to dig into code would be better off buying the $50 dev kit. The answer will come when the device goes on sale.