All the AI agents that can live in your text messages

A new wave of AI assistants are foregoing stand-alone apps and instead live inside standard messaging channels, letting users text or call an agent as if messaging a person. These assistants promise to remember conversational context, connect to calendars and email, and carry out multi-step tasks such as scheduling, reservations, research, and follow-ups without requiring users to switch inboxes or install extra software. Different services target distinct user needs. Caddy, available in public beta since April 2026, scans a phone’s messages and calendars to surface items that need action and can add events or set reminders. Folk, which entered beta in May 2026, supports iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram, can run code on a private cloud to execute multi-step tasks, and offers a Pro plan for $8.33 per month to lift limits on background tasks. Several startups focus on family and travel use cases. Fambot, launched into beta in early September 2026, is built as a family “chief of staff,” sending nightly summaries of upcoming events and handling school and activity logistics; it currently links to Gmail and Google Calendar and has said support for Outlook and Apple Calendar is planned. Miso specializes in travel planning over iMessage, combining AI planning with a human travel team to book flights and surface updates and recommendations. Ohai and Fambot both market family-oriented workflows, turning forwarded messages and emails into organized plans. On the higher end of market attention, Instinct has drawn major funding and publicity for providing an always-available, action-taking assistant accessible via text or voice. After early fundraising at a $2.5 billion valuation, Instinct raised $1 billion in September 2026 at a $10 billion valuation; it is still in private beta and has started issuing dedicated email addresses for assistants and adding call support. Other broad-purpose options include Martin, reachable by SMS, WhatsApp, Slack and more, which offers calendar and communication management with subscriptions starting at $21 per month, and Iris, which uses the Hermes agent to let users delegate tasks via iMessage while retaining context and proactive follow-ups. As these services expand their capabilities to act autonomously and integrate deeper with users’ accounts, they also introduce new privacy and security considerations: delegated accounts, email addresses owned by an assistant, and automated interactions with third-party services can simplify workflows while shifting control and data access to the agent providers.