What Is Poke? The AI Assistant That Lives in Your Texts

Poke is an AI personal assistant that lives inside your existing messaging apps rather than in an app of its own. You text it the way you would text a person, in Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram or RCS, and it handles your email, calendar, reminders and web searches. It is free to start, with paid tiers at $19 and $199 a month, and unlike most things in this category you can sign up right now with no waitlist. It does not record or transcribe your conversations, which matters if that is what you came looking for.

	Poke	Legend One
What it is	Text-message AI assistant	Worn AI memory pendant
Price	Free, Pro $19/mo, Ultra $199/mo	$499 USD, first year of membership included
Available today	Yes, no waitlist	Yes
What it captures	Your email, calendar and connected apps	Spoken conversations around you
Records conversations	No	No audio file is ever created. Transcribes live to text
Job it does	Reduces admin	Keeps what was said

Who Makes Poke?

Poke comes from The Interaction Company of California, based in Palo Alto. The important detail, and one a lot of coverage still misses, is that Interaction was acquired by Cognition on 23 July 2026. Cognition is the company behind Devin, the AI software engineer.

Cognition's own announcement says Poke users "can continue using the product just as before", and Poke's homepage carries the banner. Neither company has published a deal value. So if you are weighing Poke against alternatives, you are betting on Cognition's roadmap, not on an independent startup's.

Can You Actually Use It?

Yes, and that is more unusual than it sounds. Half the assistants getting written about this year are private betas with a waitlist and no price.

Poke's own release notes, dated 19 March 2026, say plainly: "Poke is now generally available without a bouncer or waitlist." The free tier is marked "No credit card required". You sign up and use it.

What Does Poke Cost?

• Free: $0 a month. "Get started and explore what Poke can do for you."
• Pro: $19 a month. "Frontier models and proactive automations working in the background."
• Ultra: $199 a month. "Frontier intelligence powering every action, running your life on autopilot."

One gap worth knowing before you commit: Poke does not publish the numeric limits of the free tier. Its docs describe "a small usage allowance that's enough to get a feel for Poke and handle light everyday use", with no message count or credit figure. Ultra states that "1 credit = $1 of usage", but the credit allotment per tier is not published either. You find out what you have from your own subscription page.

That makes the free tier hard to plan around. It is fine for trying the thing, less fine for deciding whether $19 a month is necessary.

What Can It Actually Do?

Poke describes itself as "your AI assistant that lives in Apple Messages, Telegram, WhatsApp, and RCS". The built-in jobs are email management (read, search and draft without leaving your messages), calendar scheduling and availability checks, reminders, and web search.

For email and calendar it supports Gmail and Outlook inboxes, calendars and contact sync. Beyond that, its published integration list leans noticeably technical: Linear, Todoist, Notion, Asana, GitHub, DeepWiki, Sentry, Vercel, Netlify, Supabase, Ramp, Webflow, plus Google Calendar and Oura. There is also a Recipes system for shareable automations, MCP server support and an API.

If your working life runs through those tools, Poke fits neatly. If it runs through Salesforce and a CRM, check the current list before you assume.

Does Poke Record or Transcribe Conversations?

No. This is worth stating flatly because the assistant category and the recorder category keep getting mixed together.

Poke has no microphone feature, no transcription, no meeting notes, and no notetaker that joins calls. Nothing in its homepage, docs, release notes or FAQ mentions any of it. The only audio-related line in its entire privacy policy concerns recordings of their customer support calls, not yours.

So Poke can tell you what is in your inbox. It cannot tell you what your colleague said to you in the corridor, because it was never there and it never listened.

The Licence Clause Worth Reading First

This is the part we would want flagged if we were buying, so here it is with the caveat that we are describing a document, not giving legal advice.

Poke's terms grant it a licence to "use, copy, store, modify, distribute, reproduce, publish, list, make derivative works of, and display your User Content", and the stated purposes include "training third-party artificial intelligence and large language models underlying the Service".

Two words in that list deserve a second look: publish and distribute. This is a licence covering content Poke reads out of your Gmail. It may well be defensive boilerplate, and broad licences like this are common. It is still worth understanding before you connect a work inbox.

Three other clauses in the same vein. Connecting a third-party service grants blanket access: "By connecting to the Service via a Third-Party Service, you give us permission to access and use your information from that service." Any Recipe you build becomes Interaction's property, not yours. And disputes go to binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver.

On training, Poke is on by default with a real opt-out, branded Maximum Privacy: "Data from users who select Maximum Privacy will not be used for model training." Deletion is concrete too, which is more than many competitors manage. You delete your account at poke.com/settings/privacy and Poke says "the full deletion process may take up to 24 hours". No retention period is published for data you do not delete.

There Are Humans in the Loop

The Ultra tier includes what Poke calls Poke Human, where a person completes tasks the model cannot. Poke says operators "only see the specific details needed for your task" and "cannot access your chat history, memories, or integrations".

That is a reasonable design and the disclosure is to their credit. It is still a fact to weigh if the tasks you would hand over involve a work inbox or anything confidential.

Who Should Use It

Use Poke if your problem is admin volume. Too many emails, too much scheduling, too many small follow-ups that pile up. Texting an assistant instead of opening yet another app is a genuinely good interaction model, and the free tier costs you nothing but the time to connect an account.

Look elsewhere if what you are losing is spoken information. Poke is not built for that and does not pretend to be.

Where Legend Fits

These two solve problems that sound similar and are not. Poke reduces what you have to do. Legend One keeps what was said to you.

Legend is a voice-first AI memory pendant made for people with ADHD, worn at chest height, always on with no button to press. It transcribes speech to text live across more than 150 languages using three microphones with speaker separation, and no audio file is ever created at any point. Transcription happens on the device and the text syncs to your phone once you are back in Bluetooth range, so it keeps working when your phone is in another room. A Halo light shows when it is active. It is $499 USD including the first year of membership, renewing at $499 a year, which is $1,497 over three years, with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a limited hardware warranty while membership is active (1 year in the USA, 2 years in Australia).

The honest limits both ways. Legend will not book your handyman, draft your email or chase a thread you dropped. Poke will not tell you what your manager committed to on Tuesday. If your week is failing on admin, Poke is the right tool at a far lower price. If it is failing because conversations evaporate, no amount of agentic capability substitutes for a record. If you want a device that keeps an audio file you can replay, that is a third category again, and we compared the best of those in Plaud vs Pocket AI.

The Takeaway

Poke is one of the few AI assistants you can actually buy today, at a price it publishes, from a company that now has Cognition behind it. The messaging-first design is the good idea here, and the free tier makes trying it close to free of risk.

Read the content licence before you connect Gmail, and do not expect it to remember your conversations, because that is not what it does.

FAQ

What is Poke? An AI personal assistant that works through Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS rather than its own app. It manages email, calendar, reminders and web search, and connects to tools like Gmail, Outlook, Notion, Linear and GitHub.

How much does Poke cost? Free to start, with Pro at $19 a month and Ultra at $199 a month. The numeric limits of the free tier are not published.

Is Poke free? There is a free tier with no credit card required, described only as "a small usage allowance". Poke does not publish how many messages or credits that includes.

Who owns Poke? The Interaction Company of California, which was acquired by Cognition, the makers of Devin, on 23 July 2026.

Does Poke record or transcribe conversations? No. It has no recording, transcription or meeting-notes feature. The only audio mentioned in its privacy policy is recordings of its own customer support calls.

Does Poke train AI models on your data? Yes, by default, with an opt-out called Maximum Privacy. Its terms also grant a broad licence over user content that includes the words publish and distribute, which is worth reading before connecting an email account.

Pricing, availability, integrations, terms and privacy policy verified at poke.com on 15 September 2026. Acquisition confirmed by Cognition's own announcement, 23 July 2026. Prices are USD and may change; check before subscribing. This article describes published documents and is not legal advice. Photo via Unsplash.