- Napster returns as an AI gadget company
- Build your own AI team
- Work with them directly through your MacBook
Imagine a co-worker or companion, staring at you from just above your MacBook screen, always ready with a contextual answer, guidance, and even emotional support. You probably wouldn’t be thinking, “Oh, right, that’s Napster,” but starting today, perhaps you should.
It’s been a little while since many of us have thought about the now 26-year-old firm that started as a music sharing service before being virtually litigated out of existence. The brand, though, lives on in a newly relevant form thanks to its acquisition by Infinite Reality a few years ago.
Now the company (which rebranded itself as Napster) is unveiling Napster View, a hardware/software suite that brings agentic AI to your MacBook (running M1 or higher) desktop.
The hardware, a holographic screen that attaches to the top of your screen (connecting via cable), serves to display a huge library of AI agents (some 15,000 of them), all with different looks, personalities, and, most importantly, skills (this includes designers, well-being guides, creative gurus, and even a chief of staff).
The holographic image, which is powered by the MacBook’s Apple Silicon (no Windows version is available for now), appears to look you in the eye and, with your permission, can see what’s on your screen and help you. It can also use your system’s camera to see, say, what you’re wearing (or plan to wear), and then your smiling agent will offer hopefully useful fashion advice.
The Napster View software (Napster 26 platform) can also be entirely desktop-based, but Napster reps told us there’s a benefit to not taking up screen real estate just to house agentic AI.
Napter View Agents on standby
In a live demo, I watched as Napster agents assisted in Photoshop work and even business plan brief creation. On the latter, though, the agent didn’t simply create the document. It insisted that now was not the right time because the brief would be made based on assumptions. We were told this is a feature, not a bug. Napster wants these agents to be helpful, and that can mean being more critical and offering real feedback.
Behind these agents is a variety of models from partners like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google‘s Gemini 2.5 model. The agents appear to switch up models based on the tasks.
Napster also partnered with Eleven Labs, which might be responsible for the somewhat overly polished looks of your agentic team.
Napster View goes further, though, and can guide you to create a digital twin who can appear on other users’ Napster View hardware (or on the desktop). It can converse in your stead, gathering information that you can read as a summarization later in an email.
Some of it appeared a bit creepy: that face watching you from just above the screen and instantly knowing what you’re working on, for instance. Still, I could also see how helpful it might be, especially when you’re stuck on how to make something work in Photoshop or if you can’t quite analyze the data coming out of your analytics system.
I saw a lot of this in action and was impressed.
There’s still music
Music is still, in a way, part of Napster’s core DNA.
We used one of the agents, Nyx, an AI R&B singer and composer agent, to talk through concerns about AI and then let her create a pair of songs about it. I listened to Nyx “sing” a catchy tune that included the lyric, “AI takes jobs…”
You can also, if you choose, use your digital twin to create a song, though I don’t know why you’d do that.
These agents appear capable of almost any task, but Napster told us that if there’s a situation where an agent can’t help you, they instantly create a new one to fill in that blank. In a somewhat weird footnote, these agents are designed as fully-realized personas who continue posting and creating content that appears in their own feeds. At one point, we saw Nyx in a selfie bikini photo.
One other quirk I noticed is that the AI agent’s speech didn’t always appear in sync with the face animations.
Napster View starts at $99, and there will be service fees for access to the AI agent team.
In a way, I like how Naspter View ties the AI to your desktop and core intents. It’s certainly smarter and less off-putting than an AI wearable. As for how much prosumers will want to engage with these agents, well, I guess that depends on just how helpful they really are.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
