I Switched From ChatGPT to an AI That Texts Me Back

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Source: Interaction

We’ve all seen ChatGPT spit out endless text.

None of us like it. Just like you probably hate when it forgets something you told it or just fails to follow your instructions.

I hope by now you’ve realised that chat apps were never the end game of AI interactions.

They’re slow, buggy and full of annoyances.

That’s why I couldn’t ignore the following launch:

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Finally, a good(ish) way to interact with AI

As good as I’ve been able to get my own AI chat app, it’s always felt a bit off.

But when I first tried Poke, I instantly realised that this is the proper way to use AI — except for a couple of use cases.

Poke is an AI assistant that lives inside your favourite messaging app and the only one officially approved by Apple to live inside iMessage (which is by far the best messaging app out there).

Not much is known about the model it uses, though attempts at figuring that out have been made. What’s known is that it has a very ‘cool’ and human personality, largely due to prompting.

It’s easily customisable, you can integrate it with your favourite tools, and it genuinely feels like an assistant, not an LLM.

The real problem isn’t Poke. It’s Apple.

While Poke did have its own issues, like a 50-minute outage, my biggest pain using it has been Apple’s lack of care for iMessage.

For example, I cannot send messages with images from my Mac. I always have to paste them to my iPhone and send them from there, because otherwise they take multiple hours to send.

I’ve also found out how bad Apple’s voice dictation is (luckily they’re improving it soon) and more annoying bugs in iMessage.

Finally, I also found one issue with using a true chat app as your way of communicating with AI: it’s only great at communicating.

Well, that’s only partially true in the case of Poke. They work around this very well using integrations like your mailbox and doing work in the background with subagents.

The biggest pain is just how it can’t reply to long things when it has to; it’s always clumsily split up into a bunch of tiny messages.

So for tasks like that, I think an integration that can have Poke hand off the work to a chat app like ChatGPT would be great. I’m looking into building one that connects to my own app soon.

That brings me to perhaps the best part of Poke.

Customisability that’s actually useful

Poke offers two ways of ‘making it yours’:

1. Recipes
2. Integrations

The first are basically custom GPTs with specific goals. I made one to let me share ideas or content I come across that I want to review later, another one to keep track of my reading habit, and one that saves new words I come across in a spreadsheet to review.

It’s incredibly easy to make these (just ask Poke to do it or visit the ‘Kitchen’). They are, however, limited.

For really useful features, add your own integrations. I added two custom ones: Google Sheets (for a true 2nd brain) and my own custom MCP I made.

The latter is for my new AI newsletter. I can now just ask Poke to spin up research agents to find this week’s big news and mail it to me, and it does it.

When AI becomes addicting

Using Poke, I genuinely asked myself a question for the first time:

“What thinking/work do I want to outsource to AI, and what do I want to always do myself?”

This was the first time I actually realised that AI could genuinely end up doing everything. Poke was an assistant that actually helped me get more productive.

With Anthropic opening the discussion about slowing down AI development, I think now is a great time we also ask ourselves some questions.

If you can outsource everything to AI, what would you still do manually?

Is it worth using AI for tiny and simple ‘convenience’ tasks that take minutes?

With AI managing your mailbox, where do you draw the line between what data it can and cannot access?

These questions have never been more important, so think about them.

Fun fact: you can ask Poke to upgrade to their Pro plan, and it chooses the price for you. People have been going crazy negotiating it down to $0. I personally have my subscription locked in at $1.01/mo, not bad. How low can you get?