I'm A Product Guy.

Good, bad, great, all products can be better.

San Francisco, CA USA

If you’re like me, you slightly obsess over every product you come across and are either impressed and inspired by an amazing experience or deeply disappointed by a total miss.  I can’t keep this ecstasy or misery to myself so there’s usually some rant which follows.

It’s Finally Cool To Poke?

December 05, 2025  /  Garrett Gaudini

Poke saves you from your inbox distraction machine. 

Poke?! No, not that poke, the cringiest of Facebook social features. The new Poke is an AI assistant that lives in messenger - it’s appless, it’s sassy, it’s going to organize your life and has the most unique onboarding experience ever, so let’s dig in! 

I'm a Product Guy who spends too much time in my inbox, so when Poke launched in September 2025 with the AI boom-not-gloom promise of the gift of time, I had to try it. The product premise is simple: your AI assistant should not live in another app, the interaction needs to be in iMessage, just like a human assistant. Wait, are we finally getting Her?

I vaguely remember when email first became mainstream and executives had their secretaries print out important emails and read them aloud. At the time, that seemed ridiculously backwards, but here we are, 25 years later, and we're now all secretaries. We sift through hundreds of emails ourselves, manually sorting the signal from noise, getting distracted by things that don't matter right now, while forgetting why we opened our inbox in the first place!

Enter Poke, built by The Interaction Company of California 🌴, a conversational layer that keeps you away from your inbox entirely. You text Poke through iMessage, SMS, or WhatsApp like you'd text a human assistant, and it handles your email, calendar, and files behind the scenes and reports back when it’s done. 

The founding team of Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel won Elon Musk's Not-a-Boring competition in 2021 with a tunnel-boring machine, and worked at Tesla, Apple, Stanford, and MIT. During a closed beta over the summer, 6,000 Silicon Valley insiders from companies like Dropbox, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic sent 200,000 messages per month to Poke. Early retention numbers are darn near perfect.

Poke, the sassy bouncer.

Onboarding is really creative. You start by texting Poke and having a conversation to learn more and how to sign up. Pricing is even more creative, Poke uses dynamic pricing based on "user needs" and you are pitted against the aggressive onboarding "bouncer" to negotiate your entry price. And she is sassy! An ode to the film Her, I think my Poke is Scarlett Johansson, sorry not sorry, I can’t unlearn this.

THE GOOD

Messaging-First Interface, A+

This is Poke's killer feature and it's executed beautifully. No new app to download. No new interface to learn. No switching contexts. You just text Poke requests like you would your human assistant.

  • "What's my confirmation number?" 

  • "Reply to the email, yes, and say something nice."

  • "Create a calendar event for dinner with Gianna next Friday."

All answered instantly via text. This is exactly what I wanted: a conversational experience that eliminates the need to go into my inbox and get distracted by 67 other emails.

Proactive AI, A

Here's where Poke shines. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which sit waiting for you to ask questions, Poke proactively surfaces what matters, nudging you when it’s important.

  • Rescheduled meetings

  • Upcoming deadlines

  • Flight changes

  • An article you may find interesting

This is full-on executive assistant mode! No need to check your inbox, Poke brings the important things to your attention. During my testing, Poke caught a meeting reschedule buried in a thread that I absolutely would have missed.

Voice Interaction Potential, A

Here's where this gets powerful for someone like me who enjoys running and who’s also always running around. I can be jogging through San Francisco, dictate the intent of an email to Poke through voice, and it handles the translation to coherent, even professional email-speak. “Please add Rob to the calendar invite. And reply back to his email that we’re confirmed.” becomes a properly formatted email without me ever opening Gmail.

Right now I'm using the safety net of reviewing drafts before they send, but I suspect those guardrails will come off soon. The dream is handling email while maintaining stride, never breaking flow.

✨ Purposeful Restraint, A

Poke’s product team made a conscious choice not to do everything. It doesn't generate code. It doesn't create images. It doesn't try to be a general-purpose AI. Instead, it excels at email, calendar, and task management - the stuff that actually runs your life. This focus is refreshing in a world where every AI tool tries to be everything to everyone. Will we see AGI in our lifetime? IDK, but if it does happen, it’ll take a while. And in the meantime, I’ll be using narrow AI to keep my life in order.

Smart Automations, A-

Every morning at 7am, Poke sends my daily overview with calendar events, important emails that need attention, and key updates relevant to my day. Some of my automations include:

  • Create a daily schedule for me

  • Add flights automatically to my calendar

  • Send a morning weather update

The automation gallery lets you browse pre-built workflows or create custom ones just by asking. "Hey Poke, automatically add any flight confirmations to my calendar"it just works.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT

Inbox Filtering Needs Work, B-

Poke can notify you when important emails arrive and when emails are from real people versus automated newsletters. This is great in theory, but the filtering isn't quite smart enough yet. I still get notifications for emails that aren't urgent, and occasionally something important doesn't get surfaced.

The dream is an assistant who understands the nuances of when to alert me of a suspicious Amex charge and not every time I resupply LMNT salts. One who truly understands business context versus personal importance. This email from my wife about Spring Break planning is important but not time-sensitive. The sales solicitation LinkedIn message that can wait forever. Poke isn't quite there yet.

Integration Depth is Limited, B

Poke connects to email, calendar, and some files, but the integrations could go deeper. It can't search my Slack history and there’s a Notion integration but not one for Google Docs, or Google Workspace, or whatever they’re calling it this year. For people whose professional lives span multiple platforms, Poke only sees part of the picture.

Better Meeting Intelligence, B-

Poke sees my calendar, but it doesn't do much with that information yet. Ideal meeting intelligence would:

  • Pre-brief me on who's attending and why this meeting exists

  • Pull relevant emails and documents into a pre-meeting summary

  • Suggest talking points based on recent email threads

  • Send follow-up emails with action items after meetings end

This would transform Poke from an email assistant to a true executive assistant.

THE FUTURE

The vision here is clear, everyone deserves a personal secretary who knows them deeply, handles the boring stuff autonomously, and frees you to focus and live your actual life. Poke is the best execution of this vision I've seen so far.

But there needs to be more autonomy. Right now Poke still requires too much prompting. I want Poke to feel less like a chatbot I occasionally text and more like an always-on assistant who's constantly working on my behalf. More Her, less ChatGPT. 

The technical architecture is sophisticated - multiple specialized agents, each owning different threads of work, orchestrated by an interaction layer that routes requests intelligently with a sassy natural language model. This gives Poke room to scale into much more complex interactions and I’m here for it. 

The Future Is Her

Poke needs true conversational intelligence that understands my entire professional and personal context. Right now it's reactive - I ask questions, it answers. The next level is predictive and autonomous. What if?

"Garrett, you have three hours of meetings today but haven't confirmed your double date Gianna is planning for next week. Want me to check your calendar and confirm?"

"Your flight got delayed, which means you'll miss the start of your first meeting. Want me to ask if we can push it out 30 minutes?"

This level of proactive intelligence requires Poke to deeply understand my patterns, priorities, and relationships. The infrastructure is there, they just need to dial up the proactivity and build a stronger customer graph profile, oh and add a sexy voice.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Poke nails the core insight that your AI assistant shouldn't require you to learn a new interface or install yet another AI app. By living in Messenger, it removes the friction between "I need to handle this" and actually handling it.

The product is early but promising with flashes of greatness. The messaging-first interface is strong. The proactive interaction works. The automation options are an OK start. The focus on email and calendar is smart.

But the onboarding experience may not be for everyone, the filtering isn't quite smart enough yet, and the integrations need to go deeper for me to justify the price long term. Most importantly, Poke needs to become more autonomous, even less chatbot, more executive assistant.

Pricing varies by user, but depending on what the AI bouncer decides Poke is worth trying if you're drowning in email and want a better way. The retention numbers don't lie - once people start using Poke, they stick with it. Poke creates a buffer between you and your inbox distraction machine. It's a secretary who sits in your inbox, reads everything, and only brings you what actually matters - when it matters.

Final Final: A-

Poke is the closest thing yet to an AI assistant that actually feels like an human assistant. The messaging-first interface is brilliant, the proactive intelligence shows promise, and the core insight is sound. However, it does need more autonomy, better filtering, and deeper integrations before it fully delivers on its ambitious promise. The company and product are still early so I’m hopeful. 

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