Grais vs Poke (2026)

Poke wants to be a person in your inbox. The homepage calls it your new favorite contact, over Messages, WhatsApp and Telegram, with a personality that texts like a friend. Cognition, announcing the acquisition, says people exchanged more than 100 million messages with it in three months, and that it is the only AI agent approved to text natively on Apple Messages. Grais will never be a pin in your conversation list. If the joy of the product is texting an agent, Poke already won.

It also reaches further into the rest of the day. Free includes connecting email and calendar with no card required. Recipes wire up Gmail, Notion, Oura, GitHub, Linear, Todoist, Outlook and a long tail of other apps. Developers get a Kitchen for custom recipes. Grais does not ship those first-party inbox recipes. MCP and Skills are how it reaches work tools, and its home surface is still the open messaging thread.

Poke texts first. Reminders, scheduled tasks, voice memos, and automations that fire from connected services are the point. Grais will flag when someone you already talk to has gone quiet. It will not summarise your inbox at 8am or add Granola action items to a calendar because you asked a contact named Poke.

Grais is invitation only. New accounts require approval; existing accounts keep their access. New purchases are paused.

Grais is not a second contact. It runs inside the conversation you already have open. You are on WhatsApp Web, Telegram Web, Instagram, LinkedIn or Tinder, looking at a real message from one specific person, and Grais reads that thread on screen and drafts the reply there. The unit of work is one reply to one person, not an errand to hand off to a bot in another chat.

That is the mix-up this page exists to kill. People hear "AI on WhatsApp" and picture something in their chats. Poke is on WhatsApp because you message Poke on WhatsApp. Your chat with a client, a date, or your sister is a different thread, and Poke is not in it. Grais is.

Approval works per contact. Grais grants trust one relationship at a time and lets it escalate from review, to voice approval, to known-safe autonomy. Nothing sends without the trust level you set for that contact. Poke is the counterparty. There is no send-trust slider for everyone else, because Poke is not writing as you into their thread.

Memory points at the person rather than the task. Grais carries context across conversations, channels and time, so it knows who said what and what was promised to whom, and it recognises the same person across WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Telegram. Poke remembers you, your recipes and your connected apps. That is the right memory for a chief of staff. It is the wrong memory for a reply to someone else.

Grais is invitation only. New accounts require approval; existing accounts keep their access. New purchases are paused.

Pally is the other "text one assistant for life admin" product on this hub. Poke is a different company, now joining Cognition, with its own prices, recipes and Messages approval. Do not reuse a Pally verdict here. The shared fact is the job: both are contacts you message. Grais is the opposite job, drafting as you in threads that already exist.

A workable split is to let Poke hold the inbox, the calendar and the recipes from your phone, and let Grais handle the replies that decide something, such as the client thread on LinkedIn or the WhatsApp you would otherwise rewrite four times.