folk vs Poke
The axis is what happens to what you tell it. Poke is the only agent Apple approved and its policy says it trains on your data unless you turn that off; folk built an isolated cloud computer per user and says it never trains at all.
Side by side
| folk | Poke | |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord | iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram |
| How you start | Unknown | Create an account |
| Who starts it | On a schedule | Messages you first |
| Pricing | Not published | Free tier; Pro $19/month; Ultra $199/month |
| Can do | Email, Bookings and reservations, Web research, Task management, Travel, Persistent memory, Writing code | Email, Calendar and scheduling, Reminders, Travel, Web research, Task management |
| Trains on your conversations | States it does not | Yes, with opt-out |
| Status | Live | Acquired |
| Company | Not published | The Interaction Company of California, acquired by Cognition |
Rows where the two agree are dimmed. Every figure comes from the product’s own public pages, checked 2026-09-06.
What actually differs
Poke's significance is regulatory. It was the first independent third-party AI agent approved on Apple Messages for Business, a programme that is otherwise invite-only and closed to new partners, and it reached over 100 million messages before Cognition acquired it in July 2026. Everything else in this directory reaches iMessage some other way.
folk's significance is architectural. Every user gets an isolated cloud computer of their own plus a persistent memory graph, and it runs across iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp and Discord.
Their published policies point in opposite directions, and this is the thing to weigh. Poke's says data is used to "train our artificial intelligence models" and that "data from users who select Maximum Privacy will not be used for model training", making training a setting that is on by default. folk's says "we never use your data to train AI models", with a separate commitment that Google Workspace data is not used to train or fine-tune any model. Poke is also the more expensive at the top, at $199 a month against folk publishing no price at all.
folk is for
Anyone who wants the architecture to make the privacy promise rather than the policy.
Poke is for
Anyone who wants the officially sanctioned route into Messages and will manage the setting.
There is no winner here on purpose. These are different products for different situations, and the paragraph above names the question that tells you which you are in. See all nine providers compared or answer five questions to narrow it yourself.