Poke

Poke is a personal AI agent that lives inside your text messages, built by The Interaction Company of California in Palo Alto. On 4 June 2026 it became the first AI agent approved by Apple for the Messages for Business platform, adding native iMessage access alongside SMS, Telegram and WhatsApp, the last of these in some markets only. TechCrunch reported in July 2026 that Cognition, the company behind Devin, had acquired The Interaction Company in a deal valuing it in the low nine figures. Poke continues to operate unchanged through the end of 2026 and plans to remain on Apple's platform, with the two teams exploring how Poke and Devin might converge in 2027. The idea is that you text Poke the way you would text a friend and it handles the task. Poke manages calendars through Google Calendar and Outlook, drafts and sends email through Gmail and Outlook, and controls smart home devices including Philips Hue and Sonos. It also edits photos, checks you in for flights, tracks flight deals, sets reminders, summarizes videos and searches the web. It connects to Notion for notes, Oura for sleep and health, Strava for fitness, Navan for travel, GitHub for developer workflows and Granola for meeting actions. It is proactive rather than purely reactive, sending morning briefings, flagging urgent email and running scheduled automations without being prompted. Poke is model-agnostic, routing each task to whichever model suits it across several providers rather than being tied to one. Its extensibility comes from Poke Recipes and the Kitchen system: users and developers connect their own Model Context Protocol servers to Poke, which then discovers and calls those tools during a conversation. Interaction publishes a verified MCP server template with one-click deploy for exactly this purpose. Poke is therefore an MCP client rather than an MCP server, meaning it reaches out to other people's tools rather than exposing an endpoint that external assistants connect into. A public API with an API key also allows messages to be sent to Poke programmatically. A community recipe marketplace covers productivity, health, developer, finance and travel categories. Pricing is fully public and self-serve, with no sales gate on any tier. Free is $0 per month, described as Free Forever, requires no credit card and includes connecting apps, email and calendar. Pro is $19 per month billed monthly or $16 per month billed yearly, a yearly total of $192, and adds frontier models for complex tasks, real-time automations running in the background and higher rate limits. Ultra is $199 per month billed monthly or $160 per month billed yearly, a yearly total of $1,920, and adds frontier models on every action, the highest rate limits and pay-as-you-go usage beyond the included credits. What the free tier does not buy: frontier models, background real-time automations and the higher rate limits all sit on Pro or above. Poke is a personal assistant, not a team or enterprise product. There is no admin console, single sign-on, audit logging or centralized user management, and no security certifications are published, so organizations with governance or compliance requirements are not the intended buyer. Teams wanting a shared inbox or a customer-facing support agent are served by a different class of product, such as Respond.io ($79/mo billed annually) or Intercom Fin ($0.99 per resolution). Current state Q3 2026: Poke remains available worldwide over iMessage, SMS and Telegram, with WhatsApp limited to some markets. TechCrunch reported in July 2026 that Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages over the preceding three months and that the product is used by hundreds of thousands of people. Cognition co-founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan were angel investors in Poke before Cognition acquired it. Poke's privacy policy states that user data may be used to train its AI models, and that data from users who select the Maximum Privacy setting is excluded from model training.