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.

Everything below is real and current 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.

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, and the whole pitch is that using it feels like texting a friend. As of June 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.

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. The Team plan is usage-based. The Business plan is custom and adds admin policy, roles, SSO, and audit export, 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.

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.