AI Agents by Text: The Assistants Living in Your Messages

AI Agents by Text: The Assistants Living in Your Messages

A new kind of AI assistant does not ask you to install anything. You add it to your contacts and text it like a friend. A recent TechCrunch roundup lists close to twenty of these services, from general helpers to tools built for families, travelers, creators and office workers.

The basic pitch is similar across most of them. You send a message describing what you need. The agent keeps track of context, connects to apps you already use, and carries out the task. Typical jobs include booking appointments, sorting a calendar, planning a trip, sending email, reserving a table, shopping online, or reminding you of something several days later.

The funding leader: Instinct

Instinct is the best-funded name in the group. It first raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. In September 2026, a $1 billion round lifted that to $10 billion.

Users reach Instinct by text or voice and link it to services such as email, calendar and Google Workspace. According to the company, early users have planned trips, bought groceries, booked tickets and cancelled subscriptions with it. In September it started giving each assistant its own email address, so the agent can create accounts, contact businesses and follow up on requests without filling the user's inbox. It has also started rolling out phone calls. That degree of autonomy has drawn privacy and security concerns. Instinct is still in private beta.

General-purpose assistants

Several rivals target everyday personal admin:

  1. Caddy runs in iMessage on iPhone and RCS on Android. It scans calendars and conversations for items that need action, then adds events, sets reminders, tracks follow-ups and does research. Public beta since April 2026.
  2. Folk works over iMessage, WhatsApp and Telegram and runs on its own private cloud computer, so it can execute code and multi-step tasks. Free beta since May 2026; Pro costs $8.33 a month for unlimited background tasks.
  3. Martin is reachable by SMS, phone, WhatsApp, email, Slack and an iOS app. It can send messages and place calls for users. Plans start at $21 a month.
  4. Poke launched in March 2026. In June, Apple approved it as the first AI agent on Apple Messages for Business. A month later, Cognition bought its parent, The Interaction Company of California, in a deal valued in the low nine figures.
  5. Iris (built on Hermes agent), Rene and Pally follow the same text-first model. Rene also has a browser, writes code and makes slides and images. Pally offers a free tier and paid plans at $25 and $100 a month, priced partly by call minutes.
  6. Wajo's Fo has its own email address, phone number and payment card, so users never hand over their own credentials. When it gets stuck, Wajo says a human assistant can finish the job.

Built for families

Household coordination is the most crowded niche. Fambot sends a nightly summary of the next day, including events, to-dos and details like school uniforms, and parents can reply to make changes. It connects to Gmail and Google Calendar, raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding, and plans to charge roughly the cost of a Netflix subscription after its free beta. Ohai starts at $9.99 a month, priced by family size. Ollie says it is one of the first mainstream family assistants with SOC 2 compliance, a widely used security standard; paid plans run from $25 to $100 a month. Orbits, backed by a16z's Speedrun fund among others, can book restaurants, make purchases and request quotes from service providers.

Travel, content and work

Miso pairs AI trip planning in iMessage with a dedicated human travel team and accounts for loyalty points. Stanley acts as an AI head of content for creators, turning voice notes into scripts and captions and scheduling posts. Tomo ($19.99 a month) can join group chats instead of serving only one person. Town focuses on professional tasks across email, documents and Slack, and raised a $55 million Series A in June 2026. Skye, from Signull Labs, takes a different route as an "agentic homescreen" for the iPhone that surfaces cards and audio briefings.

Our Take

The pattern here is a move away from standalone apps toward the messaging thread as the main interface. Similar ideas are showing up at larger companies, from a DoorDash agent that takes orders by text to OpenAI's always-on Dots agents. For users, the friction is low. The trade-off is access. Many of these assistants read inboxes, calendars and chats, and some hold their own email addresses, phone numbers or payment cards.

That makes security the likely point of separation. Ollie's emphasis on SOC 2 and the concerns raised around Instinct suggest buyers will increasingly ask what an agent is allowed to do, not just how clever it is. Recent disputes over agents reading private messages point the same way. It is worth watching whether a crowded field of similar products consolidates, as Poke's sale to Cognition hints, and whether platform owners like Apple begin setting firmer rules for agents in messaging.