THE DAILY DOWNLOAD / POKE / STAFF PICK
Everyone’s launching AI agents. Poke just lives in your texts.
This week OpenAI, Meta and SpaceXAI all pushed agents that work for you. Our favourite personal AI has been doing it over text all along: no app, no new logins.
The TL;DR
- Poke is a personal AI assistant you simply text, over iMessage, SMS, WhatsApp or Telegram.
- It handles the life admin: email, calendar, reminders and scheduling. Users sent it more than 100 million messages in three months.
- Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, bought Poke's maker in July. Poke keeps running through at least the end of 2026.
Staff pick time. While the giants spent the last two weeks launching agents with their own computers, avatars and price tiers, Poke has been running a simpler play: it lives where you already are, in your texts.
You message Poke like you'd message a friend, and it talks back like one. It keeps your inbox, calendar and reminders in line and gets you through your day's to-do list. In June, Apple approved Poke as the first AI agent on Apple's Messages for Business, so it can live in your Messages app as a verified account. No extra app, no new logins, no learning curve. Gen X: it's like having a personal assistant on your pager, except it actually texts back.
People are into it: users exchanged more than 100 million messages with Poke over three months. In July, Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, bought The Interaction Company, Poke's maker, in a deal valued in the low nine figures. Cognition says Poke stays up through at least the end of 2026, and the bigger plan is to bring its friendly, human way of talking to Devin.
Full transparency: Poke didn't announce anything new in the last two weeks. It's on this list because the rest of the industry is racing toward the thing Poke already nails: an AI that feels less like software and more like a contact in your phone.
Why you should care
If big AI apps feel like a lot, Poke is the easy on-ramp: if you can send a text, you can use it. The lesson for every product team: personality and convenience are becoming as important as raw brainpower.
Vibe check
Low effort, high reward. The group chat's favourite member.