There’s a new kind of AI in town, and it’s all about you. Which is to say you, personally—these are the new personal AI assistants that go by names like Muse, Dots, and Grok Bot, and they’re ready to dismantle much of the friction in your life. Need to research a trip, book a restaurant, or choose between healthcare plans? With the right context, they can handle it all for you, complete with a smile on their mascot-like avatars.

But just how does one of these assistants recommend what to buy? To find out, I asked my Muse, who I named Jones, which robot vacuum to buy. (Muse is made by Meta, which debuted it on Sept. 8) Jones responded with a surprisingly small number of recommendations—just a couple of models—with links to go make the purchase. Each of those links provided options to go to a retailer website or buy the vacuum right there in the app.

When I pressed Jones on why it had chosen those particular models, and whether it had looked at review sites specifically, it fessed up that it had looked at both retail sites and review roundups. On the latter, it leaned heavily on a site called Vacuum Wars , which does extensive hands-on testing of this category, and Jones seemed to understand that made it more authoritative. Of the other “review sites” it cited, one was a thin repackaging of Vacuum Wars data, and another was an AI-generated roundup on an aromatherapy blog.

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