AI phone agents are back—and businesses are still hanging up

Meta has rolled out a feature for its Muse AI that lets paying U.S. subscribers have the agent place calls to businesses on their behalf, handling tedious tasks like waiting on hold or navigating phone menus. This turns Google’s 2018 Duplex demo into a standard offering, joining similar capabilities from Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok Bot, and startup Instinct, though OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s models still can’t make calls.

Despite the convenience for users, many businesses simply hang up when they detect an AI voice, forcing Meta to briefly test human operators as a fallback—a replay of Google’s experience where one in four Duplex calls needed a human. As synthetic voices become more realistic, detection gets harder, but the underlying reality remains: AI phone agents face the same old human resistance, making this less a breakthrough and more a rerun of a familiar tech-industry script.