As smartwatches head toward becoming AI companions, Meta might be working a new angle.

I was in the audience at Meta’s Connect conference in late September when Mark Zuckerberg held up a pendant in his hands and surprise announced the Muse Charm, a little novelty-like device with Meta’s disarmingly adorable Muse AI agent onboard. Muse Charm is coming as soon as December this year.

But the funny thing is, while most people called it an AI Tamagotchi, all I saw was a strapless Apple Watch. Is that what the Muse Charm could be, eventually? A watch as well as a pendant? Is this Meta’s entry to wrist wearables in disguise? I’m still thinking about it…because smartwatches are also on their way to being AI assistants soon, too.

Reports of Meta working on its own watch wearable have been cooking for several years now. At Connect, there were smart glasses galore and even a new glasses-like VR headset coming next year. But things were suspiciously quiet on the wrist wearables front.

Meta already has one wrist wearable, the neural band that comes with the Ray-Ban Display glasses. But it received no hardware updates this year, which surprised me. The sensor-studded band uses electromyography, or EMG, to measure skin-contact electrical signals for a set of gesture controls to navigate the heads-up glasses display. Meta’s already ambitiously promised that EMG could open up all sorts of neural input possibilities, even testing the tech in a smart car dashboard prototype.

As far back as last year, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told me that some sort of display or watch-like evolution of the neural band could be in the works next.

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