Your AI texting assistant: everything it can do (and what surprised me)

For years, "AI assistant" meant Siri not understanding me or Alexa turning on the lights when I asked for the weather. Then ChatGPT showed up and the bar moved. But ChatGPT is an app I have to open, and most of the time the thing I need from an AI assistant is small. A quick answer. A reminder. Something I think of while I'm driving or standing in line somewhere.

So I started using AI Chat SMS, which is exactly what it sounds like: an AI assistant you talk to through regular text messages. You text a phone number, an AI texts you back. No app, no login, no account setup. Your messages app is the interface.

I've been using it for a while now and I keep finding new stuff it can do. This is my attempt to catalog all of it.

A day with your AI texting assistant

The easiest way to explain what this thing does is to show you a random Tuesday. These are all real types of interactions, spread across a day.

Seven different things, and I didn't open a single app for any of them. That's the part that keeps catching me off guard. The AI assistant lives where I already am, in my texts, so using it doesn't feel like using a thing. It just feels like texting.

Let me go deeper on the ones I actually use the most.

Quick answers and web search

This is the boring one, but it's probably what I use most often. Any question you'd normally Google, you can text instead.

It pulls live results, so it works for weather, sports scores, stock prices, current events. The answers come back in a few seconds, usually as a concise paragraph rather than a wall of text.

The thing I like about this over Googling is that I don't end up on some SEO-bait article with four paragraphs of backstory before the actual answer. I ask, it answers. Done.

Reminders that actually come back

This one sold me. You text something like "remind me at 3pm to call the vet" and at 3:00 PM, you get a text message. Not a notification from an app you might have muted. A real text, front and center.

Then on Friday morning:

You can also set recurring reminders. "Remind me every weekday at 8am to take my vitamin" works. So does "every Sunday at 6pm, remind me to meal prep." The AI assistant figures out the schedule from plain English and just... does it.

I've tried a dozen reminder apps over the years. The reason this one sticks is that I don't have to open anything to set it and the reminder arrives as a text. Both sides of the interaction happen in the same place I already check fifty times a day.

Daily briefings

This was a surprise. You can ask the AI assistant to send you a daily summary on any topic, delivered at whatever time you want.

Every morning after that, a text shows up with a few paragraphs covering what happened in the last 24 hours. It's like a personalized newsletter, except it arrives as a text and it's written specifically for you based on the topic you picked.

I have one for tech news and one for NBA scores during the season. My wife set one up for local school closings and weather alerts. You can have multiple running at once.

The quality is surprisingly good. It reads like something a person wrote, not like a list of headlines scraped from RSS feeds.

Image generation

This one's fun. You text a description and the AI texting assistant generates an image and sends it back as a picture message.

I use this for birthday cards, random gifts for friends, and the occasional argument about what a hypothetical thing would look like. It's not Midjourney-level control, but for "I want a quick image of this silly thing," it works great and you don't need to be at a computer.

It remembers you

This is the one that actually surprised me. The AI assistant has long-term memory across conversations. It remembers things you've talked about days or weeks ago.

It remembered the recipe and the context around why I asked. That felt different from any AI tool I'd used before. Most of them start fresh every conversation. This one builds up a picture of who you are and what you care about over time.

It's useful for practical stuff too. If you tell it your dietary restrictions once, it remembers for future recipe requests. If you mention you live in Austin, it uses that for weather and local recommendations without you having to say it again.

Send it photos

You can text the AI assistant a photo and ask questions about it. This is one I didn't expect to use much, but I keep reaching for it.

I've used it for identifying plants, reading nutrition labels when my glasses aren't nearby, checking if a rash looks concerning (it always says "see a doctor," which is fair), and figuring out what type of cable I need at the hardware store.

Connect your other stuff

The AI texting assistant also connects to Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Outlook. Once you link an account, you can manage it through texts.

I wrote a whole post about the Google Calendar integration, but the short version: you can create events, ask what's on your schedule, set up recurring calendar items, and get weekly summaries, all from a text.

Gmail works similarly. "Send an email to Jake about Friday's meeting" or "do I have any emails from the insurance company?" Both work.

You connect each service by texting /connect calendar or /connect gmail, tapping a link, and authenticating. Takes about a minute per service.

Why SMS matters

I could talk about features all day, but the thing that actually makes this different from ChatGPT or any other AI assistant is the medium. SMS.

Text messages don't need Wi-Fi or mobile data. They go through your cell carrier, which means the AI assistant works in places where apps don't: dead zones, airplane mode (on some carriers), areas with weak signal but cell service. If you can make a phone call, you can text your AI assistant.

There's also the dictation angle. In the car, you can hold the microphone button and dictate a text to your AI assistant without touching your phone. "Hey, remind me to grab milk on the way home." It works with CarPlay, Android Auto, or just your phone's native voice-to-text. No hands required.

And this is minor but I notice it: I don't get sucked in. There's no feed, no sidebar, no "you might also like" section. I text a question, I get an answer, I put my phone down. For me, that's a feature, not a limitation.

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That's the full picture, or close to it. An AI texting assistant that handles quick answers, reminders, daily briefings, image generation, photo analysis, and connects to your calendar and email. All through the same messages app you already use.

I still use ChatGPT for long research sessions and code. But for the other 90% of what I want from an AI assistant, texting is faster. Ten free messages if you want to try it.