The Verge's Sean Hollister has built his own version of Meta's Muse Charm, the squishy AI companion pendant Meta plans to sell this holiday season, for $50. His hardware is a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a 1.75-inch touchscreen pendant that Meta itself officially suggests as a starting point for building a 'Muse Gadget' — Meta publishes open-source code and tokens so the devkit connects directly to the Muse AI cloud, and he paired it with the Muse phone app.

Out of the box the gadget was limited: Muse treated spoken input as clips to transcribe rather than commands, replies were slow, and only a few words fit on screen at a time. Hollister, who says he has no coding background, used sessions with Anthropic's Claude Code to fix much of that — adding a conversation history page, an ElevenLabs voice that speaks answers aloud, a remote camera viewfinder, a batch of avatars and a Tamagotchi-style minigame, plus a pocket-watch face and video playback.

His trust limits are part of the story: he kept the device on a guest Wi-Fi network and says he does not trust Meta or Muse with his home network or email. Meta's retail Charm adds cameras and a 5G radio the devkit lacks, and its price is still unannounced. Whether the retail unit will be as freely programmable as the devkit version remains an open question.