Equerry vs Poke

Both are AI personal assistants. The difference is who they're for: Poke is a messaging-first assistant for everyone; Equerry is built for senior, client-facing professionals who live in email and walk into meetings that need context.

What Poke is

Poke is an AI personal assistant that lives in your messages. Its homepage headline is "Meet Poke, your new favorite contact," and it describes itself as "Proactive, private, personal, and right in your texts" — you reach it through Apple Messages, Telegram, WhatsApp or RCS (the list in its own docs; the homepage names the first three), choosing your channel on the Poke website, and poke.com does not document an iPhone app. It works from the accounts you connect: its FAQ says Poke "offers full support for Gmail and Outlook inboxes, calendars, and contact sync," and its docs describe the email side as "Read, search, and draft emails without leaving your messages." Its Poke-Team recipe catalog includes a "Morning Briefing" — a daily summary of your calendar, top emails and priorities. Its Explore page groups use cases under To-Dos, Developers, Calendar, Email, Health, Travel, Finance, Students and Home, among others — a broad, everyday spread. Plans are Free, Pro at $19/month and Ultra at $199/month; Ultra includes "Poke Human," which "dispatches real-world tasks to a real person on your behalf" — "restaurant reservations, phone calls, placing orders, booking rides." (All from poke.com, read 2026-09-04.)

What changed in 2026: Poke joined Cognition

On 23 July 2026 Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, published "Welcoming The Interaction Company": "Today, we're welcoming The Interaction Company of California, the makers of Poke, to Cognition." Two lines from that post matter if you are choosing an assistant now. On continuity: "Today, Poke users can continue using the product just as before." On direction: "Soon, Cognition's models and infrastructure will make Poke even faster and more reliable." Poke's own release notes for the same day put it the same way: "Poke works exactly as before, and there's nothing you need to do." Cognition also describes Poke as "the only AI agent approved to text natively on Apple Messages" — Poke's release notes date its arrival on Apple Messages to 4 June 2026. The announcement gives no dates beyond "today" and "soon" and does not name who runs Poke day to day; Poke's privacy policy, last updated 23 June 2026, still names The Interaction Company of California Inc. (Cognition announcement and poke.com, verified 2026-09-04.)

What Equerry is

Equerry is a personal assistant built around what you choose to share. You forward or CC it the emails that matter, dictate a quick voice memo, drop in a PDF or a screenshot, or save a note — and it remembers. Before your next client call it briefs you from what you've shared, and when you ask it something it answers with the source attached, so you can trust the answer. It's built for the person juggling many client relationships at once, where the cost of forgetting a detail is real.

Equerry vs Poke at a glance

Poke column verified 2026-09-04 against poke.com (homepage, pricing, FAQ, docs, Explore, privacy policy, release notes, recipes) and Cognition's announcement of 23 July 2026. Poke changes often — check its site for the latest.

When Poke makes sense

If you want a general assistant you talk to in a chat app for everyday tasks, and you prefer living inside messaging, Poke fits that shape well. It suits you especially if you are happy to connect your Gmail or Outlook account so it can read, search and draft in your inbox, and if the errands you would hand off are the everyday kind — its own FAQ says "Most features in Poke are free," and the Ultra plan adds real people for "restaurant reservations, phone calls, placing orders, booking rides." Since July 2026 it is part of Cognition, and both companies say it works as before.

When Equerry makes sense

If your work runs on email threads and meetings — and you need an assistant that remembers the specifics of seven different client relationships, shows you exactly what it remembers, and hands you a briefing before each call — Equerry is built for that. The deciding factor is usually two things: do you want memory you can verify and delete, and do you want to share context deliberately (by forwarding or CC-ing) rather than handing over your whole inbox? Poke, by its own description, works "right in your texts" from the accounts you connect; Equerry works from the specific threads, notes, voice memos and documents you choose to share, and shows you every fact it kept so you can check it or delete it.

Last updated 2026-09-04.

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