Before you hand over your inbox to an AI assistant, perhaps you’d like to meet a little guy.
His name is Jolly. He’s cute, cheerful-looking, and the default mascot for Meta’s Muse AI assistant. He also gives a friendly face to Meta’s much bigger ambition of making its AI part of your everyday life.
At Meta Connect on Sept. 23, Mark Zuckerberg showed off Muse and introduced Muse Charm, a Tamagotchi-like handheld device for interacting with the assistant on the go. With Jolly as its default avatar, it makes the idea of carrying around an AI assistant feel a little more like bringing along a tiny companion.
Giving a product a cute face is a familiar move. Duolingo has an owl whose antics you can follow without ever finishing a Spanish lesson. LINE’s sticker characters became a brand people buy plush toys from. And Microsoft’s Clippy is still recognizable to anyone who remembers trying to get him to leave them alone. (Interestingly, Microsoft recently killed its newest mascot, Pico.)
Before Jolly settles onto anyone’s keychain, meet the other mascots that show what a little character can do for a big company.
Duo, Duolingo’s owl
Credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images
You don’t have to be learning Spanish to know who Duo is. The green owl is the mascot of language-learning app Duolingo, where he encourages you to keep up with your lessons. But on social media, he’s better known for memes, petty feuds, and a willingness to make absolutely everything his business.
Duolingo has given its mascot plenty to do beyond reminding people to study. The brand is known to join in on trending conversations, joke with followers in social media comments, and once turned celebrity drama into a pretend feud with Google Translate. Following Duo has become its own form of entertainment, no vocabulary quiz required.
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In 2025, the company went so far as to announce his death. His eventual comeback was part of the “Dead Duo” campaign, which generated 1.7 billion organic impressions and brought a meaningful increase in new and returning users. For an owl employed by a language-learning app, he has a busy social life. That personality keeps people interested even when studying isn’t on their agenda.
Meet Brown from LINE Friends
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Brown has a lot to say for a bear whose expression barely changes. This straight-faced character is part of LINE Friends, the cast that started as stickers on the messaging app LINE in 2011. Alongside characters like Cony the rabbit, Brown gave people another way to express themselves in their chats.
Brown eventually outgrew the chat window. LINE Friends expanded into merchandise, stores, and collaborations, turning characters from a messaging app into a brand people could wear, collect, and give as gifts. With Muse Charm, Meta is also giving people a way to carry a digital character around. Brown offers a glimpse of what can happen when people get attached enough to want a company’s character in their lives beyond the screen.
Grimace, McDonald’s big purple mascot
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Grimace is the big purple, vaguely blob-shaped character from McDonald’s (canonically defined as a giant taste bud), recognizable enough that he doesn’t need to be holding a burger for you to know which company he belongs to. With his rounded shape and easy smile, he looks like something you’d win at a carnival and immediately want to hug.
He also gives McDonald’s a familiar face to bring back for new generations. In 2023, the company built an entire birthday promotion around Grimace, complete with his own meal and purple shake. That’s a pretty good gig for a character who doesn’t have much to say.
Yes, the shake inspired a bizarre TikTok horror trend, but the jokes also introduced him to people who hadn’t grown up with McDonald’s cast of characters, and gives new generations other reasons to connect with it (beyond the french fries).
Astro from Salesforce
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Enterprise software might not sound like the natural habitat of an adorable character. Salesforce would disagree.
Its mascot, Astro, grew out of a 2014 developer-event T-shirt design and became a guide to the company’s world. Salesforce explicitly describes its characters as a way to make technology accessible, friendly, and fun. They give newcomers a welcoming presence as they learn their way around.
It’s an understandable approach. When you’re already trying to figure out unfamiliar software, a cheerful guide can make the whole thing feel a little less intimidating. Jolly could serve a similar purpose for Meta. “Personal superintelligence” is a lot to introduce to someone. A smiling character gives them somewhere to start.
Clippy, Microsoft’s assistant
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If you used Microsoft Office during Clippy’s time, you may remember having a complicated relationship with an animated paperclip.
Clippy was an assistant with a face, popping up to offer help while people worked. Unfortunately, those interventions weren’t always welcome. A paper hosted by Microsoft Research described how earlier software agents, such as Clippy, became disliked for being intrusive and annoying. But still, the paperclip made an impression. Microsoft brought Clippy back as an emoji in 2021, giving people a way to enjoy the character without having him interrupt a document.
Microsoft has since tried another friendly face with Mico, an optional character for its Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft recently killed the Copilot mascot, shortly before it came out against anthropomorphizing AI technology.
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The company told the BBC that Mico was intended to make voice conversations feel more natural, and that users could turn it off. If Meta can learn anything from their experience, putting a face on an assistant gives people something to connect with, but it also gives their frustration somewhere to land. A character’s welcome depends on how helpful it actually is.
What does Meta want from Jolly?
There’s a reason companies keep hiring these little creatures. As marketing professor Anthony Patterson told the BBC, mascots give a company “a voice, a personality, a face even.” Author and technology commentator Nathalie Nahai explained that big eyes and oversized heads tap into our instinctive responses to babies, while pointing out that their comeback coincides with growing mistrust of tech companies. It’s easier to warm up to a cuddly character than the enormous business behind it.
Of course, people can still recognize when they’re being sold something. A 2021 study found that cute characters could help when consumers felt a brand cared about them, but could backfire when they became more aware of its efforts to persuade them.
That matters for Meta, which wants Muse to handle shopping, email, and tasks on your computer. Those are fairly personal responsibilities to hand over to a product you’re still getting to know, so giving it a friendly face could make the prospect feel more comfortable. (Meta also outlined upcoming privacy protections, including Muse Confidential VM, which the company says will use encryption to prevent even Meta from accessing users’ data.)
Jolly could help get people interested enough to give Muse a try, but staying on their keychains will come down to whether they trust the assistant and find it useful once the novelty wears off.
