Muse vs ElevenLabs: who makes your calls, who answers your phone

The short answer

Muse and ElevenLabs do opposite jobs that happen to share a telephone. Muse places calls for you: it rings businesses on your behalf to book, check, and negotiate, and it works for the person making the call. ElevenLabs and the voice agent platforms around it, Retell, Vapi, and Bland, answer calls for a business: they pick up your phone line, speak as your business, and deal with your customers. One is a customer with a phone. The other is the phone system of the shop. Almost every confused comparison of the two comes from missing that single fact, so this guide lays them side by side: direction, pricing, setup, control, strengths, and the situations where each one earns its money.

Two opposite jobs

Start with Muse. In September 2026 Meta added outbound phone calling to Muse, and the direction is the whole point. Muse calls out, to businesses in the United States, carrying your errand: a booking to make, a stock level to check, a contractor quote to chase, a customer service queue to sit in. When the call connects, Muse introduces itself as an AI calling on your behalf, and the caller ID reads META. It has no phone number of its own and it cannot receive calls. It also, as our calling guide documents in full, refuses personal numbers, which is Meta drawing a clear line around whose behalf it acts on.

Now the other side of the counter. ElevenLabs built its name on synthetic voice, and its conversational AI product puts that voice to work as an agent that answers a business's own phone line. A customer rings the number, the agent picks up in the business's chosen voice, follows the business's script, answers questions, and takes bookings. Retell, Vapi, and Bland sell variations of the same idea. The agent works for the business being called, and the person on the other end is a customer, not the owner.

Both products get described in headlines as AI that makes phone calls, which is technically true and practically useless. The useful question is never which one is better. It is which chair you are sitting in when the phone rings: the caller, or the called.

Side by side

Which way the calls go

Muse: outbound only, from the owner to businesses. It is not a phone system, and nothing about your business line changes when you use it.

ElevenLabs and rivals: inbound first. The agent answers your number when customers call. The same platforms can also place outbound calls for a business, follow up calls and reminders, working to the business's list and script. Either way, the agent speaks for the business.

Who the agent works for

Muse: you, the customer. It argues your side of the conversation, chases your refund, and guards your time. The business on the other end owes it nothing.

ElevenLabs and rivals: the business. It argues the business's side, protects the business's calendar, and treats the caller as a customer to be served and converted.

What it costs, and how you pay

Muse: a subscription metered in tokens, the same pricing as the rest of Muse. The free tier carries a weekly limit that Meta does not publish as a number, though Mark Zuckerberg has put it at up to 100 million tokens a week. Power costs $20 a month for 500 million tokens a week, and Maximum costs $100 a month for 3 billion tokens a week. Paid tiers buy usage volume, not extra features, and calling draws from the same pool as everything else Muse does for you.

ElevenLabs and rivals: a meter that runs while people talk. Reported pricing for ElevenLabs conversational AI runs at roughly $0.08 to $0.10 a minute in current coverage. The scale behind that pricing is large: coverage in October 2026 reported ElevenLabs handling more than 15 million conversations a week, with a valuation around $22 billion. Per minute billing means quiet months are cheap and busy phones cost real money, including the minutes spent on callers who buy nothing.

Getting set up

Muse: almost nothing to set up, and one thing you cannot control. You need a Muse account, and calling itself is rolling out behind a waitlist, so access arrives when Meta grants it. Once it is on, you simply instruct Muse the way you instruct it about anything else.

ElevenLabs and rivals: a genuine setup project. You connect or assign a phone number, write the script and the rules, connect the booking or customer systems it should touch, and test call it the way you would train a new receptionist. The work is front loaded, and the quality of the setup decides the quality of every call after it.

Control while it talks

Muse: you approve the mission before it dials, and Muse works inside the approval model that governs the whole product: nothing publishes, sends, or spends without the owner saying yes. On the call itself, Muse speaks for itself, introduces itself honestly, and reports back.

ElevenLabs and rivals: you write the words in advance. The agent talks live, at ringing speed, with no approval step between a customer question and its answer, because answering in the moment is the entire product. Your control is the script, the guardrails, and the call recordings you review afterward.

Where each is strongest

Muse: errands that eat an owner's afternoon. Hold queues, bookings, stock checks, quotes, and the first pass at a bill negotiation. It is strongest exactly where the job is well defined and the other side is a business set up to serve callers.

ElevenLabs and rivals: the missed call problem. After hours calls, overflow at busy times, the same five questions answered all day, bookings taken while the owner has both hands in the work. Every unanswered ring it catches is revenue a voicemail box would have lost.

Where each is weak

Muse: it is a young beta wearing a suit. Access is waitlist gated, the two capabilities users ask about most, documented phone menu handling and transfer back to the owner, remain undocumented, and Reuters reported that Meta quietly used human contractors to place some calls when the AI kept failing, a test Meta rolled back. Reporting by CNET describes carriers learning to flag or block agent calls. And none of it answers your phone.

ElevenLabs and rivals: it speaks as your business, so its worst call is your brand's worst call. A thin script, a wrong fact, or a clumsy answer happens in your name, in your voice, to your customer. The meter also runs on every conversation, wanted or not, and the setup quality is entirely on you.

The transcription number, handled carefully

One statistic travels with this comparison and deserves a warning label. In speech to text testing reported this autumn, Meta's Muse Voice Transcribe model topped the AA WER leaderboard at a 3.1% word error rate, ahead of ElevenLabs Scribe v2 at around 3.6%. Word error rate measures how accurately a model turns recorded speech into text.

That is a real result about two transcription models. It is not a result about the two agents in this guide. How well a model transcribes is one ingredient in a phone agent; how well the agent reasons, follows a script, handles a menu, and recovers from confusion is the meal. Quote the number as what it is, a reported leaderboard result for the underlying speech models, and do not let it settle a buying decision it was never measuring.

Can they work together?

Yes, as a pattern owners assemble themselves, not as an integration anyone sells. The division of labour writes itself once you see the two chairs clearly. Muse works the owner's side of the week: researching suppliers, comparing quotes, calling businesses during the day, preparing the brief. A voice agent works the business's side: answering the line, taking the booking, capturing the customer the owner would have missed. Some owners close the loop by feeding what the voice agent hears, the questions customers keep asking, back into the material Muse works from.

Be clear about the seams. Nothing connects the two products directly; there is no shared setup, no handoff button, and no single bill. You are running two tools that each happen to use a phone, and the coordination between them is you. For many small businesses that is still a good trade: the alternative is the owner personally making every call and answering every ring.

A day that runs both looks like this. Overnight, the voice agent has answered your line three times and left transcripts of three bookings. In the morning you hand those transcripts to Muse, and it drafts the follow ups, updates your notes, and flags the caller whose question it could not answer from your material. Midday, Muse calls two suppliers for quotes while you do the work only you can do. By the evening rush your agent is on the line again. Nothing in that day required the two products to know the other exists. It required you to know which chair each one sits in, which is the entire skill this comparison is trying to teach.

The verdict, by situation

Your afternoons die in hold queues and booking calls. Muse, once the waitlist lets you in. That is the job it was built for, and the subscription you may already have covers it.

Your phone rings and nobody picks up. A voice agent platform. Muse cannot help you here at all, because it has no number and answers nothing. This is the ElevenLabs category's home turf, priced by the minute and worth it the first time it catches a booking you would have lost.

You want an agent to call your leads and customers. Also the voice agent category, set up to call out as your business. Muse refuses personal numbers by design, and no setting changes that. Our guide to what Muse calling actually does covers that refusal and the third party receptionist connector now in Meta's review queue.

You run a business where every call matters and trust is fragile. Be the most careful buyer of both. Read our risk checklist before you connect either product to anything live, keep a human answering the calls that carry your reputation, and let the agents earn the rest over time.

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Frequently asked questions

Can Muse answer my business phone?

No. Muse has no phone number of its own and cannot receive calls; its calling feature only places calls out to businesses on your behalf. A third party connector that gives Muse a number for inbound and outbound calling exists and was in Meta's connector review queue as of late September 2026, but it is not a Meta feature and its status is unconfirmed since. Answering your line today is a voice agent platform's job.

Can ElevenLabs make calls for me the way Muse does?

It can place calls, but not in the same role. Voice agent platforms call out as your business, to your customers, following your script. Muse calls out as you, the customer, to businesses serving you, and it refuses personal numbers. The identity on the call is different, and that difference is the product.

Which one is cheaper?

They meter different things, so the honest answer depends on your shape. Muse calling draws from a subscription priced in tokens: free with a weekly limit, $20 a month for Power, $100 a month for Maximum, and calling shares that pool with everything else Muse does. ElevenLabs style pricing is reported at roughly $0.08 to $0.10 a minute of conversation, so cost follows how much your phone rings. A quiet phone favours the per minute meter; an owner drowning in outbound errands favours the subscription.

Does the 3.1% transcription result mean Muse hears calls better?

Not on the evidence available. The 3.1% word error rate, against around 3.6% for ElevenLabs Scribe v2, is a reported leaderboard result for speech to text models. Transcription accuracy is one ingredient in a phone agent. How an agent reasons, follows instructions, and handles a phone menu is a separate question, and for Muse calling it remains largely undocumented.

Will people know an AI is calling?

With Muse, yes, by design. The caller ID reads META and Muse introduces itself as an AI calling on your behalf. With a voice agent answering your business line, the setup is yours: you choose the voice, the greeting, and how openly it identifies itself, within the rules that apply to your market.

Can I use Muse and a voice agent together?

Yes, as a pattern you assemble yourself. Muse works your side of the week, research, quotes, and calls to businesses, while a voice agent answers your line and takes bookings. There is no integration between the two products, no shared setup, and no handoff button; the coordination is you. Owners who run both describe the split by chair: Muse is the caller, the voice agent is the called.

Built with Muse is an independent community project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Meta.