I missed a price drop on a monitor after asking Muse AI to watch the listing. I pasted the product page into the chat and asked it to notify me if the price went down. Nothing came through. I only noticed because I checked the page myself.
What should I try next? Is there a background task or notification setting I need to enable, or does it only check when I open the chat?
I wouldn’t rely on “I’ll watch it” in a chat until you can verify an active task with a next check time and an alert destination. From what you described, I can’t tell whether Muse actually created a background job, so I wouldn’t assume either that it’s monitoring continuously or that opening the chat triggers a fresh check.
Try making the request more explicit: “Check this listing every morning and notify me if the price falls below my target. Check it now first, tell me the price you can read, and confirm whether you can repeat this while I’m away.” Then look for a saved task or schedule in the interface, if your version has one. I’d want something you can inspect, pause, or cancel, rather than another conversational promise.
Before trusting it with the monitor, I’d test the checking and notification steps separately. Ask for a short-delay test notification, then leave the app and see whether it arrives. Check notification permissions for whichever app or browser should deliver it. Separately, ask Muse to read the listing’s current price and identify the seller and selected model. For the actual watch, ask it to report a failed price check rather than stay silent. That gives you a way to distinguish “no price drop” from “couldn’t check.”
If you can’t verify a recurring task, I’d use the retailer’s price-alert option, if available, or a dedicated price tracker instead. Which Muse app are you using, and what exactly did it say after you asked it to watch? That would help narrow down whether you’re missing a setup step or expecting a feature your version doesn’t provide.
A daily price check and an alert for every price drop are not an equivalent promise. The morning-check suggestion could very well miss a sale that began at lunch and ended that evening, despite Muse’s ability to schedule checks and alert the customer if the price drops. I would need the check frequency to be explicitly stated if I were to rely on this claim. Your missed discount does not prove that nothing ran, but a promise of chats does not prove that anything ran, either. A timestamped price history would help distinguish between times that I never checked and times that I did not check at the right time.
Be careful about replacing “tell me when the price drops” with “tell me when it falls below my target.” You could set up the second alert correctly and still hear nothing about a discount you would have wanted.
@vim_lena31’s suggested wording changes that condition. A target is useful when you have a firm budget, but your original request sounds more like “let me decide whether the discount is worth it.” For that, I’d want any decrease from the price you first saw, rather than only a price below some lower amount. That distinction matters separately from @luciddev59’s point about checking often enough.
There’s another detail to pin down: what price is the comparison based on? Suppose the monitor gets more expensive after you start watching, then returns to its original price. Should that trigger an alert? It’s a drop since the previous check, but it isn’t a better deal than when you started. Neither interpretation is unreasonable. I’d rather choose than let an ambiguous request decide for me.
My preference would be something like: “Use the price we confirm now as the starting point. Notify me when it’s cheaper than that. After the first alert, notify me again only if it reaches a new low.” That’s the alert rule, not proof that Muse can run it while you’re away. The unanswered question about background monitoring still needs resolving before you can rely on it.
I’d also specify whether a coupon counts. If the offer you missed required clipping a coupon or signing in, ask whether that exact kind of discount is included in the watch. Don’t accept a general “yes, I track prices” as an answer to that narrower question.
For this missed sale, I’d compare the offer you actually saw with the condition Muse agreed to watch. That gives you a useful distinction: was there no working watch, or was it watching for a different event than you meant? Increasing the check frequency won’t fix the latter.
The shipping cost is a detail that was not mentioned in the prompt – were you expecting Muse to take into consideration the final price or the advertised one? It can make a difference in the result as lower monitor price with an addition of shipping cost can prompt an alert while it does not save any money. On the other hand, free shipping can make the purchase cheaper while the advertised price is the same.
I’d qualify @xrustylynxx’s starting-price rule on that basis. Comparing against the starting price is useful, but I’d want the comparison to include the same costs each time. My preference would be item price plus shipping to my ZIP code, with any costs Muse cannot read explicitly marked as unknown. That’s a monitoring requirement I’d ask for, not a claim that Muse supports it. An item-only watch could still be useful, provided it’s described that way.
For the discount you’re complaining about, it makes a difference only if the terms of delivery changed. In the event that the listing simply became cheaper with everything else the same, you can’t explain your silence with this. But before rebuilding the watch, I’d choose between ‘alert me to a lower advertised price’ and “alert me to a cheaper purchase.”; I’d tolerate more alerts from the first, and I ought to get more complete price information from the second.
Most chat assistants don’t keep running after you close the window. That’s the piece this whole thread is dancing around. Everyone’s busy perfecting the alert condition, which is fine, but a flawless prompt means nothing if there’s no process alive to act on it while you’re off doing other things.
So before any of the starting-price or shipping stuff from @xrustylynxx and @aitiger3888 matters, nail down one thing: does your version actually have a scheduled or recurring task that exists outside the conversation? If it only ‘watches’ while the chat is open, you weren’t being monitored, you were being humored. @vim_lena31 already pushed you toward checking for an inspectable task, and honestly that’s the only part I’d treat as mandatory. The rest is detail.
Here’s the annoyance nobody flagged yet. Even when these tools can schedule checks, a lot of retail pages don’t give up their price cleanly. The number loads through scripts, or the page throws up a sign-in wall, or the URL quietly mutates and points somewhere else a week later. The assistant can ‘succeed’ at checking a page that no longer shows what you think it shows. That’s a silent failure mode no wording change fixes.
My honest read: for a single monitor, this is more fuss than it’s worth. The retailer’s own price-drop alert, if the listing has one, is going to be more reliable than anything you cobble together in a chat, because it’s reading its own prices. A standalone price tracker is the next step up when the store doesn’t offer alerts. Use the AI for the fuzzy judgment part, like ‘is this discount actually good compared to its usual street price,’ not for the plumbing of watching and pinging you.
If you do insist on the AI route, run the dumb test first: ask it to ping you in a few minutes, close everything, and see if the ping lands. No ping, no watch. Don’t trust it with the monitor until that basic loop works.
Don’t count a notification saying “check the monitor price” as a working price alert. That’s where I get confused by @carl_tech’s test: receiving a ping would show that a reminder works, but I still wouldn’t know whether Muse actually opened the listing again. I’d want the test message to include the price it found and when it checked, or say it couldn’t read it. Otherwise, I could end up with a scheduled nudge to do the shopping myself, which isn’t what I’d understand “watch this listing” to mean.
If your version runs tasks on their servers instead of your phone, closing the app is fine. If it leans on your device staying awake, the watch dies the moment your screen locks or the OS kills the background process, and you’d never get told. Worth figuring out which one you have before anything else, because it changes whether the whole approach can even work for you.
@carl_tech is right that the retailer’s own alert is the boring reliable choice, but I’d split the difference. Let Muse do the judgment call you actually want help with, deciding whether a given price is a real deal, and let the store or a tracker handle the pinging. Trying to make one chat do both is where people lose discounts and don’t find out for a week.