Pally vs Poke (2026)

Pally connects to Gmail, Outlook and iCloud mail, Google and iCloud calendars, WhatsApp through Linked Devices, iMessage through its Mac app, Slack, Google Drive, Docs and Sheets, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Jira, Todoist, Granola and X, with app authorization handled by Composio and room for custom integrations.

It acts in them, sending WhatsApp and iMessage messages and email, forwarding mail, creating calendar invites and editing a Google Doc in place once the user approves. Sites without an integration are reached through browser errands that sign in with saved logins, and a bank account can be linked read only for recurring charges.

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In Gmail and Outlook the assistant searches, drafts and sends mail, replies in thread with attachments, forwards, files and labels, and it creates and edits calendar events and syncs contacts.

Recipes add read and write access to Notion pages and databases, Linear and Asana projects, Todoist tasks, GitHub repositories, Vercel and Netlify deployments, Supabase, Ramp spend data, Webflow and Oura, authorized by OAuth or an API key during setup.

Any other service joins as an MCP server added by URL, with an API key or OAuth credentials, or tunneled from a local machine, and Poke discovers and calls the tools it exposes.

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Background tasks carry an errand across messages, email, the browser and calls, retry after a brief model error and pick up new choices from the chat while they run. Automations are written in a sentence and can carry conditions, such as nudging a friend who still owes money once three days pass. Through the trusted network, a user's Pally hands parts of a job to the Pallys of a partner, friends or colleagues, each acting under its own owner's sharing choices, and in a group chat each member's request runs on that member's own Pally and accounts.

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A single assistant carries each request across email, calendar and connected tools, so one text can ask it to send onboarding email, schedule a kickoff, create a Notion project and set check in reminders. Recipes package the integrations, an automation and onboarding questions a job needs, and automations keep running in the background on Pro and Ultra. Multistep work rests on the assistant's own planning inside the conversation, with no workflow designer or team of agents to lay out.

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Automations fire the moment something happens, such as an email from a landlord, or on a schedule, and email triggered rules read new Outlook and Gmail messages as they arrive. Morning briefs, alerts on important messages across every connected account, flight day changes and price drop or restock watches arrive unprompted. People reach Pally by text, voice note or a call to its number, and in an iMessage or Telegram group it answers when someone names it or replies to one of its messages.

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Poke is built to message first. Real time automations run in the background on paid plans, reminders and scheduled tasks fire on their own time, and the assistant watches connected services and its memory to step in, for example adding the action items from a Granola meeting to the calendar. Users reach it by text or voice message in Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS, and real time sync keeps Gmail and Outlook inboxes current.

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Connected mail, calendars, chats, Drive files and Notion pages are read when a question needs them, and web research runs through Exa. From each connected inbox Pally also keeps structured records of receipts, order confirmations and renewal notices from about the past 12 months, with merchant, items, amount, date and repeat cycle, alongside recurring charges from a linked bank account. Outside those purchase records, documents are read at request time instead of being indexed into a lasting knowledge store.

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Answers draw on the user's own mail, calendar, contacts and connected apps, queried as each request runs, with web search for everything else, including maps and directions. Notion pages and databases, GitHub repositories and DeepWiki documentation become further sources once their recipes are added, and Poke can read a photo of a spreadsheet and turn it into a table or chart. The assistant keeps no searchable store of the user's files of its own, so each answer is assembled from those live sources.

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Memory is built around people, not files, covering who the user talks to, what they last discussed and what was promised, such as a friend's dietary needs or a deck owed to an investor. Pally tidies it every night, and the user can ask what it remembers, edit it, tell it to forget something, which then stays out after the nightly update, download it or delete the account. Memory is held per user, a group chat's history and memory belong to the group, and both are kept while the account is active.

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Poke keeps memories about the person it works for and combines them with connected services to act at the right moment, while the human operators behind Poke Human see only the details of their task, never the chat history, memories or integrations. Deleting the account clears data within about 24 hours, with backups and legal holds taking longer. What a memory holds, how long it lasts and how a single memory is reviewed or removed are left unsaid.

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Pally checks with the user before it spends or sends anything not already asked for or approved, and sends on its own only within limits the user sets, such as messages to a named group. A purchase lays out the exact items, seats, fees and total for a single approval, stops if any of them change, and follows the wallet's own approval settings.

Drafts appear before they go and expire after seven days unapproved, approvals can be given by voice during a call, approvals in group chats happen privately in each person's own thread, and the user can take over a live browser session and hand it back.

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The assistant acts on what the user texts it, drafting and sending email, booking calendar events and running automations in the background. Control comes through the conversation itself, by disconnecting an integration or by asking Poke to trim busy automations, and there is no approval setting or rule that holds a kind of action for sign off. Poke Human brings in a person for hard errands, a service that does the task instead of checking the agent's work.

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Each person in the trusted network picks, one capability at a time, what their Pally may share with each circle, starting from just a name and contact card, and in a group chat a personal request never runs on another member's accounts. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest with access limited inside the company, website logins sit in an encrypted vault run by Kernel that Pally itself never sees, and content arriving from outside is treated as information, never as instructions. Pally holds no SOC 2 or ISO certification and offers no team administration or single sign on.

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Accounts are personal, tied to one phone number and opened through a Google or Microsoft account, with no team workspace, roles or single sign on. Interaction applies reasonable physical, technical and organizational safeguards, follows Google's Limited Use rules for Workspace data, and keeps data from users on Maximum Privacy out of model training. Poke offers buyers no SOC 2 report, ISO certification or trust center.

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Browser errands run with a live view and screenshots the user can watch, paused while a card number is entered, and a stopped session comes back with an accurate account of what happened. Users can ask what changed in their automations, rules and saved preferences, group automations show their latest real results, and recalled activity appears in the user's own time zone. A log of every step and tool call behind a task, ready for export or review, is not part of the product.

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Requests and results live in the message thread, where Poke reports back on what it did, and instructions sent through the API land in the same conversation, so the thread doubles as the record. A subscription page tracks usage against the plan's allowance and the next reset, and a status page covers service health. Users get no separate activity log, run history for automations or audit trail of actions taken in connected apps.

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Everything runs on AWS in the US, with iMessage, RCS, phone and email delivery through US providers and Telegram traffic passing through the UAE. Cloud Mac instances are dedicated macOS machines on AWS in the US. A user cannot choose a region, and there is no private deployment or self hosting.

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Poke runs only as Interaction's hosted service, reached through messaging apps and the web, and sign ups are open in every region worldwide. Buyers get no hosting location, region choice, private deployment or self hosted option.

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Ready made recipes start from one message and each does a whole job. They include Inbox triaged, Morning brief, The friendly nag, WhatsApp and iMessage catch up, Flight finder, Flight day, Price drop and restock watch, Buy it for me, Pre meeting briefs, A memory for your people, Receipt keeper, Your Mac from anywhere, Call Pally and Quote hunter. A machine readable catalog lists every guide and recipe entry point with its opening message.

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Recipes are ready made setups a user installs in one tap, each bundling integrations, an automation and onboarding questions. Examples include a morning summary of assigned Linear issues, a TripIt import of travel plans, Oura sleep and readiness insights, Notion page organization and Gmail inbox management. The directory groups first party and approved community recipes by category, from calendar, email and finance to health, travel, students and developer tools, and creators publish their own from Kitchen after review.

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Pally picks the model for each turn. Most turns route through OpenRouter to hosts that do not train on user data, running Google Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic Claude models, with open weight models served by Phala, Novita, Together AI, Modal and Baseten for some steps, and OpenAI also handles phone calls, transcription and memory search. A user cannot choose the model, and routines that pass the usage limit keep running on a lighter one.

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Plans differ by model class. Pro brings frontier models for complex tasks, Ultra runs frontier models on every action, and the free plan falls back to a lighter mode once its allowance is used. Neither the models nor their makers are named, and a user cannot pick one. Cognition has said its own models and infrastructure will power Poke over time.

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Pally runs its own MCP server over streamable HTTP, secured with OAuth 2.1, dynamic client registration and PKCE, and it connects from Claude, ChatGPT in developer mode and Cursor once the user sends a single use code in the Pally chat. It exposes two tools, message_pally to send a message and get the reply and check_pally to collect the result of a long job, under the same approval rules as the chat. There is no public API or SDK for managing tasks, automations, memory or connections directly.

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The Poke API is one endpoint. A POST with a bearer key from Kitchen delivers a message to the user's own assistant, which carries it out like a text, and the examples cover a browser extension that sends a selected page, a GitHub Action that reports a failed deploy and a Typeform or CRM webhook that hands over a new lead. The poke npm package logs in, adds MCP servers and tunnels local ones, and Kitchen publishes recipes. There is no API for reading conversations or managing integrations, recipes or automations.

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An automation starts work as soon as it is written, with no test run, quality check or side by side comparison beforehand. Pally reports changes to a user's setup once and explains them on request, which keeps configuration visible without measuring how well the assistant performed.

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A recipe or automation goes to work once installed, and users have no way to run it against sample input, check its output against expectations or compare versions first. When automations fire so often that a user keeps reaching the plan's limit, the fix is to have Poke review and trim the busiest ones, which manages cost and speed, not quality.

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Browser errands run in a hosted browser on Kernel that signs in with saved logins or Google, reads one time codes from email or messages, fills checkout forms, takes seat holds and completes orders on sites such as Amazon and Instacart, stopping to tell the user what a site needs when it gets stuck. The user can watch the live view, take control and hand the session back. The Pally Mac app lets Pally see the user's own Mac screen, find a file and run the next step, and Cloud Mac, sold separately, gives it a dedicated macOS machine in the cloud.

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Poke works through integrations, web search and messaging, and it can build and publish a website, but it does not drive a browser, a desktop or a phone's apps. Errands that need a phone call, an order or a booking go to a human operator through Poke Human on the Ultra plan.

Sourcepoke.com/faqread 2026-10-12