The Verge Reporter Builds a $50 Meta Muse Charm Alternative With Claude Code

Meta is preparing to sell the Muse Charm for the holidays: a pocket AI assistant with a little face, similar to a Tamagotchi. The Verge writer 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 does 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-source 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. Muse at first treated the audio it received as audio files to transcribe, not as commands. After a fix, replies still arrived slowly and were not spoken aloud. The screen fit 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 find 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 it is nearly useless for taking photos.

What Claude Code added

A few sessions with Claude closed almost all of these gaps. To do it, he reconnected the board to the PC and simply described each change in words.

• Reading replies: a conversation history page, opened by swiping right.
• Speech: a British ElevenLabs voice from the free tier. The author and his wife found it the least annoying of the available options, though it does not suit the cute avatars.
• Camera: a button on the pendant takes a photo on the phone through a 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.
• For 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 on its own.

The only noticeable lag left is on Meta's servers, which sometimes respond quickly and sometimes slow down noticeably.

What this says about the real Muse Charm

The author is wary of giving Meta and the Muse agent access to his personal email and main home network, especially after a recent incident in which the AI agent accidentally leaked the home address of a tech blogger who was testing the device. For safety, the homemade pendant has therefore been isolated on a separate guest Wi-Fi network from day one.

Hollister's main takeaway is practical. After several near-drops of the heavy silver pendant, he concluded that Muse alone 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, for example letting you reprogram the entire gadget to your liking.

It remains an open question whether the production Muse Charm will be just as freely programmable. If 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.