The shift from apps to agents
Ever feel like you have way too many apps? Same. The new wave of AI assistants isn't trying to build another destination for your storage space—they’re moving into the one place you already spend all your time: your text threads. By using SMS, iMessage, or platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, these agents act like a personal assistant you can reach as easily as your bestie.
Meet the roster
- Instinct: The big player in the game, currently sitting at a $10 billion valuation. It’s heavy on autonomy—it can even get its own email address to handle sign-ups or customer service calls for you.
- Caddy & Folk: These are your productivity powerhouses. Caddy scrapes your phone’s mess of info to update your calendar, while Folk runs on its own private cloud, executing multi-step tasks rather than just chatting back.
- Comma: Think of this as your digital project manager that works across your computer and browser, keeping you looped in on progress.
- Family-focused tools: Fambot, Ohai, and Ollie are trying to organize the chaos of family life. They sync school emails, sports schedules, and meal plans, with Ollie standing out as one of the first in this group to hit SOC 2 security compliance.
- Specialty agents: Miso is built specifically for travel, handling flights and loyalty points via text, while Martin offers a high-end, general-purpose experience across almost every messaging platform imaginable.
Why it matters
Real talk: the hype is high, but the utility is what counts. These tools are trying to bridge the gap between 'AI that talks' and 'AI that actually does stuff.' By living in your messages, they cut out the friction of opening new apps. Just keep an eye on the privacy settings, especially as these bots start handling your emails and making phone calls on your behalf—lowkey, that's a lot of power to hand over to an algorithm.
