Poke alternatives — AI assistants for work and personal life

If you're shopping for Poke alternatives, you're really choosing between three different products that happen to share a category. Poke and Martin are personal helpers you talk to. Lindy automates work across business apps. Arlo is an AI colleague that lives across your whole team's tools and actually answers the phone. Which one fits depends entirely on which of those jobs you're hiring for.

Poke's details were checked as of August 2026; Lindy's and Martin's as of June 2026. After the rundown, I'll make the case for Arlo if you want one assistant spanning iMessage, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and live calls. For a wider ranked field, see the best AI assistants you can text.

The main Poke alternatives at a glance

Assistant	Where it works	Best for
Poke	iMessage, SMS, Telegram (WhatsApp in some markets)	Personal tasks over text
Lindy	Email, Slack, calendars, business tools	Workflow automation at work
Martin	Voice, text, email	Voice-first scheduling and reminders
Arlo	iMessage/SMS, Slack, Teams, live phone calls	An AI colleague across a team's tools, with governance

Poke

Poke comes from The Interaction Company in Palo Alto — acquired by Cognition, the lab behind the Devin coding agent, on 23 July 2026 in a reported low-nine-figure deal. The whole pitch is that using it feels like texting a friend. As of August 2026 it runs over SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in some markets, and it was one of the first third-party AI agents you could reach through iMessage. The sweet spot is everyday personal stuff: planning your day, juggling your calendar, the kind of back-and-forth you'd do over text anyway. Pricing is negotiated. Light requests are free and heavier ones cost.

The acquisition is worth a moment if you're choosing for a team — we unpack it in what the Cognition deal means. Poke keeps running and picks up Cognition's models and infrastructure, but the stated reason for the deal was to bring Poke's conversational style into Devin — so the product's personality is now also an input to a developer-tools roadmap. That's a question to ask, not a reason to rule it out.

Want the head-to-head? See Arlo vs Poke.

Lindy

Lindy is built to get work done, not chat. As of June 2026 it pitches itself as a workflow automator that plugs into email, Slack, your calendar, and a long list of business apps. It'll triage an inbox, sit in on meetings and record them, and chain together multi-step workflows on its own. If your problem is repetitive business processes rather than wanting a chatty assistant in your texts, Lindy is the obvious pick here.

Martin

Martin is the voice-first one. It hooks into your calendar, email, and messaging, and you can talk to it, text it, or email it. As of June 2026 it's mostly described around scheduling, reminders, drafting quick messages, and daily updates. If what you actually want is something you can speak to like a personal assistant, that's the lane Martin was built for.

Why Arlo is the best Poke alternative

Every other assistant on this list picked one lane: personal texter, work automator, or voice scheduler. Arlo refuses to. It's meant to be one colleague for the entire workspace, and that range is why teams pick it over Poke.

• It works everywhere, including the phone. Arlo is in iMessage and SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and live phone calls. No new app to learn, and no dropped context when a thread turns into a call.
• It remembers, and it briefs you. Arlo holds onto what matters across conversations and sends a morning briefing on what changed overnight, so you're not re-explaining yourself every time.
• It does things, not just talks. Arlo connects to Slack, Gmail, Notion, Linear, GitHub, and 3,000+ other tools. When something has no API, it logs in once through a secure browser session and clicks, reads, and fills forms the way a person would.
• Governance is the default, not an add-on. Every connection runs through policy before each turn. Drafts, sends, and writes pause for a reviewer you pick, and every tool call, source, and approval lands in an audit trace. That's the real line between Arlo and a personal text-bot. One is built for teams that need accountability.
• It scales past one person. Arlo runs on prepaid credits at 400 per $1, bought in amounts from $50 to $50,000. Admin policy, roles, SSO, and audit export are available on request — which is what an org wants before it lets any assistant act on its behalf.

How to choose

Pick Poke or Martin if you just want a personal assistant for your own texts, calendar, and reminders. Pick Lindy if the goal is automating business workflows across apps. Pick Arlo if you want one colleague across iMessage, Slack, Teams, and calls, with memory and governed actions your team can audit.

Comparing options for a founding team, a sales org, or a brokerage? See how Arlo fits as an AI assistant for founders, for sales, or for realtors.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best Poke alternatives? Lindy, Martin, and Arlo, and they pull in different directions. Poke and Martin are personal helpers you talk to over text and voice. Lindy automates work across business apps. Arlo is an AI colleague across iMessage and SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and phone calls, with governed actions and an audit trail.

What is the best Poke alternative for a team? Arlo, because the gap with Poke is not features but accountability. A personal assistant has no shared context between people, no approval step before something goes out in a teammate's name, and no record of what it did. Those become required the moment an assistant acts on a team's behalf.

Is there a free Poke alternative? Poke itself is light-free with heavier use paid, and Lindy has a free tier plus paid plans. Arlo is free to start too: connecting Slack grants your workspace $100 in credits (40,000), no card required. After that you buy prepaid credits at 400 per $1, starting at $50 — roughly 625 messages — and anything unused stays good for 12 months rather than lapsing monthly.

Which Poke alternative can make phone calls? Arlo places and takes live calls at its own number and summarizes them back into your records. Martin is voice-first for spoken interaction. Most text-first assistants in this category do not place calls at all.

Why would I stay with Poke? If the assistant serves exactly one person and the tasks are personal — your calendar, inbox, reminders, travel — Poke does that job well and the team controls in Arlo would only add friction. Switching pays off when the work becomes shared. See the head-to-head at Arlo vs Poke.

Try Arlo

Arlo is the Poke alternative for teams that want one assistant everywhere they work, with governance and a full audit trail. Try Arlo to put a colleague inside the tools you already use.