Poke, a product from The Interaction Company of California, is trying to make AI assistants feel less like a separate app and more like another contact in your phone. The service runs inside iMessage, Telegram, and SMS, where users can ask it to manage email, schedule meetings, set reminders, search the web, and work with connected services.

The new angle is Poke Recipes, a library of one-tap automations that lets users start from prebuilt workflows instead of prompting from scratch. Poke's public docs and recipes page show the company is packaging the product around simple setup and reusable actions, with categories ranging from health and wellness to developer tools.

That matters because most consumer-facing AI agents still live behind chat apps, terminals, or dashboards that assume users are willing to learn a new interface. Poke is taking the opposite approach by moving the assistant into channels people already use for daily coordination.

The product is still early, and some of the broader claims around scale and monetization come mainly from TechCrunch's reporting, so the clearest verified shift today is product availability and packaging. Poke's own release notes show Recipes went live on March 19, while an earlier February update added Telegram support as an alternative messaging channel.

For now, the story is not breakthrough model research. It is a practical distribution bet: if AI agents are going mainstream, some of them may arrive as text threads first.