Text-Based AI Assistants Emerge as New Alternatives to Dedicated Apps
A growing market of AI agents allows users to manage calendars, travel, and household tasks directly through text messaging interfaces like iMessage, RCS, and WhatsApp.
Instead of downloading standalone applications, users are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence assistants that operate directly within ordinary text messaging platforms. These text-based agents can retain conversational context, integrate with existing software tools, and perform tasks ranging from booking travel to scheduling calendar events.
While high-profile tools like Instinct—which recently secured a $1 billion funding round reaching a $10 billion valuation—dominate headlines, dozens of other agents are entering the market to target specific use cases such as family coordination, professional productivity, and specialized travel planning.
Diverse Tools for Families, Travel, and Work
The ecosystem of messaging-based AI assistants covers a wide range of everyday functions. For households, options like Fambot, Ohai, and Ollie aim to centralize school schedules, meal planning, and fragmented family communications into unified text updates. Ollie distinguishes itself by achieving SOC 2 security compliance, while others like Orbits and Pally help coordinate chores and household purchases.
For specialized professional and personal needs, platforms take different approaches. Miso integrates AI trip planning with a human travel team through iMessage. Stanley targets content creators by connecting to Instagram accounts and turning voice notes into scripts and schedules. Meanwhile, tools like Town focus on professional environments by integrating with email, calendars, and Slack, a product backed by a $55 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Forerunner.
Other general-purpose assistants emphasize deeper autonomy. Folk operates on a private cloud computer capable of running code and executing multi-step operations. Instinct and Wajo provide their agents with dedicated email addresses and phone numbers, allowing them to create accounts and contact businesses independently. Notably, Wajo incorporates human assistants to finish tasks when the AI reaches its operational limits. Poke gained attention as the first AI agent approved on Apple Messages for Business before being acquired by Cognition.
What it means for developers
The proliferation of text-based AI agents highlights a major shift in user experience design, moving from dedicated application interfaces to ambient, conversational layers embedded inside existing messaging channels. Developers building these agents must handle complex integrations across disparate third-party APIs—such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and messaging protocols like RCS and iMessage—while addressing significant security, privacy, and infrastructure challenges. For builders looking to prototype and scale similar agentic workflows, developers can try top AI models cheaply through one API at https://apixoai.online. Building reliable multi-step agents requires balancing persistent context memory with background execution capabilities, opening up new opportunities for software engineers in the conversational AI space.
Source: All the AI agents that can live in your text messages — TechCrunch AI. Written by the Apixo team from that report.
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