The Rise of the Text-Based AI Assistant

The current landscape of AI assistants is shifting away from dedicated interfaces toward platforms where users already spend their time: iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and SMS. By integrating with existing calendars, email accounts, and cloud services, these agents aim to reduce the friction of personal and professional management.

General-purpose tools like Instinct, currently valued at $10 billion, and Poke have gained traction by handling everything from grocery shopping to booking tickets. Others focus on niche utility: Fambot, Ollie, and Ohai serve as family command centers, syncing household schedules and school communications, while professional-leaning agents like Town and Comma manage recurring workplace tasks. Privacy remains a central point of contention, leading some developers to prioritize on-device processing, such as Underdog, which runs exclusively on the user’s hardware. Meanwhile, services like Wajo’s Fo and Instinct provide agents with their own dedicated email addresses and phone numbers to interact with external businesses, effectively acting as autonomous proxies for their owners.