At Wednesday's Meta Platforms Connect keynote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear that the company is trying to challenge Apple as the provider of secure, private personal artificial-intelligence services for consumers.

Investors were initially unmoved by the presentation, with the stock down more than 1% in after-hours trading while the keynote was under way.

Now at the center of the company's strategy is the recently released Muse AI personal agent, which can carry out complicated tasks on behalf of a user on a phone or computer. Backing that up is a new emphasis on private and secure interactions that even Meta won't be able to see after an update the company said is coming soon.

Meta sees e-commerce as key to monetizing Muse. It announced new retail partnerships on Wednesday adding Walmart, Best Buy, and Gap to its existing relationships with Shopify and PayPal. Amazon remains a notable holdout. Zuckerberg said that the company will take a fee from transactions executed through Muse.

But Meta is still dependent on other company's devices-Muse is available on iOS and Android mobile devices and Mac computers. Meta would like to fix that with new form factors that may one day replace the smartphone as people's primary computing device.

Meta's hardware strategy is primarily focused on smartglasses, a category that Apple is also keenly interested in. There is a long road ahead to make these a mass-market product category that can supplant the smartphone as Meta predicts, and it will depend on multiple technological breakthroughs. Meta's strategy has been to sell what can be made with today's technology, which is limited by either functionality or wearability. Rule number one of a face computer is that it has to look good on the user's face.

At Connect, Meta presented three versions of its smartglasses that demonstrate the current trade-offs. There are the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which got an incremental update. These have a camera, microphones, and speakers and rely on voice interaction with Meta AI, including Muse in the "coming weeks." Meta showed off new styles of the Ray-Ban models, which look like conventional plastic-frame glasses. There are also a new audio-only range of glasses-Ray-Ban Meta Audio-that drop the camera but deliver longer battery life in a lighter, cheaper package.

Bringing a lot more functionality in a chunkier package are the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. These were previously announced, but Meta said they are now more widely available. They include an in-lens display and a wearable wristband that enables controls via hand gestures.

The new product added to the lineup Wednesday is the Meta VR glasses. Echoing Steve Jobs at the original iPhone reveal, Meta hammered-home three use cases repeatedly: "You've got a private cinema, a computer with multiple monitors, a game console," Zuckerberg said.

The presentation made the glasses look like a slimmer, lighter, much less expensive version of Apple's low-selling Vision Pro. There were few details on the specifications, but Meta VR Glasses will ship this spring for $1,299.

Meta's Reality Labs division, which houses the company's glasses and VR products, lost $19 billion last year. Whether the updated iterations improve those numbers will likely come down to how well Muse AI is integrated into them and whether Meta can create a compelling enough set of apps and use cases to attract new users while also overcoming consumers' concerns about privacy and trust.