Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage
Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage
为什么 Cognition 要收购 Poke：AI 个性正成为一种竞争优势
Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, is making its next big move. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valuing the startup in the “low nine figures.” The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will take advantage of Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, Cognition said.
Poke 是一款让你像发短信给朋友一样交流的 AI 助手，目前正迈出重要的一步。该助手的幕后公司——加州的 The Interaction Company，已被 AI 编程初创公司 Cognition 收购，交易估值达到“九位数初段”。此次收购将把 Poke 的交互模式和个性引入 Cognition 的编程助手 Devin 中。同时，Cognition 表示，Poke 将利用其模型和基础设施，变得更加快速和可靠。
What makes Poke interesting to consumers — and now, to its acquirer — is how it engages with users’ requests. Instead of functioning like a tool, Poke chats more familiarly with users, responding like a friend and even incorporating slang and humor into its interactions. That’s something that could add value to Devin’s coding agent.
Poke 之所以吸引消费者（以及现在的收购方），在于它处理用户请求的方式。Poke 不像是一个冷冰冰的工具，而是以更亲近的方式与用户聊天，像朋友一样回应，甚至在互动中加入俚语和幽默。这正是能够为 Devin 编程代理增加价值的地方。
“You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” explained Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen, in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the deal’s price. “When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable.”
“比起只有机器人的同事，你可能更喜欢有个性的同事，”Interaction Company 联合创始人 Marvin von Hagen 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时解释道，他也确认了此次交易的价格。“当你的同事也是软件工程师时，他们也可以开个玩笑。你会觉得这很有趣且令人愉快。”
The acquisition underscores a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will become just as valuable as the underlying models powering them. Cognition wants to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague. “The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: it’s proactive, it knows you, and it’s fun to talk to. That’s exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post. He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.
此次收购凸显了一个日益增长的观点：AI 助手与用户的交互方式，其价值将不亚于驱动它们的底层模型。Cognition 希望让 Devin 感觉更像同事，而不是软件。“Interaction 团队打造了一个人们喜爱的代理：它主动、了解你，并且交流起来很有趣。这正是与 Devin 合作应有的感觉，现在我们可以共同构建它了，”Cognition 联合创始人 Scott Wu 在博客文章中写道。他还提到，他和 Cognition 的另一位联合创始人 Walden Yan 此前曾是 Poke 幕后公司的天使投资人。
First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to engage with its AI agent through their messaging platform of choice, whether that’s iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for a variety of tasks, across categories like travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education. Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among Poke’s most common use cases.
Poke 于 2026 年 3 月首次推出，允许用户通过自己选择的消息平台与 AI 代理互动，无论是 iMessage、短信、Telegram，还是在某些市场中的 WhatsApp。人们使用 Poke 处理各种任务，涵盖旅游、健康、金融、日程安排和教育等领域。Von Hagen 指出，管理电子邮件、提醒事项和待办事项等生产力任务是 Poke 最常见的用途之一。
Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said. In June, Poke became the first AI agent to be approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for handling their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.
Cognition 表示，在过去三个月里，Poke 用户在平台上交换了超过 1 亿条消息。但 von Hagen 表示，尽管有数十万人使用，但 Poke 的运营成本高昂，难以实现盈利。今年 6 月，Poke 成为首个获准在 Apple 的“商务信息”（Messages for Business）平台上运行的 AI 代理，该平台为企业提供了一种标准化的体验，用于在 Apple 的“信息”应用内处理客户沟通。
Going forward, nothing will immediately change for Poke through the end of the year, we’re told. Poke plans to remain on Apple’s platform. However, next year the team will experiment with how both Poke and Devin can improve, with Poke turning to Cognition’s newest software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. Fully combining the two products has not been ruled out, either.
据了解，今年年底前 Poke 不会有任何即时变动。Poke 计划继续留在 Apple 的平台上。然而，明年团队将尝试如何改进 Poke 和 Devin，Poke 将在某些任务中转向使用 Cognition 最新的软件工程模型 SWE-1.7。完全合并这两个产品也不排除在考虑范围内。
“I think in the long term Poke can be more reliable with orchestrating all these coding [tasks]…and, at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke,” von Hagen said. “Like right now, Devin can only do one PR — pull request — at a time…I think there’s a lot of value in having Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions.” Plus, Poke could help Devin remember tasks across different sessions. “It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,” he added.
“我认为从长远来看，Poke 在协调所有这些编程任务时会更可靠……同时，Devin 也可以变得更像 Poke，”von Hagen 说。“比如现在，Devin 一次只能处理一个 PR（拉取请求）……我认为让 Poke 来协调不同的 Devin 会话非常有价值。”此外，Poke 还可以帮助 Devin 跨会话记忆任务。“拥有一个持久的同事会很好，”他补充道。