Virtual concierges join the conversation

Despite all the technological improvements to phones since texting took off, it remains mobile's killer app, whether you use it in WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger or plain old SMS.

Now, a growing number of services are taking texting beyond social interaction and communication.

So-called virtual assistant services such as Cloe, Luka and Alexis offer advice on anything from restaurants to fashion. Lark, a fitness-tracking app, chats with you about how much exercise you are taking and provides motivation. Most interesting of all, Magic promises that "whatever you want, on demand" is just a few texts away, whether you order groceries, a takeaway or even a plane ticket. A forthcoming rival to Magic called Operator, developed by one of Uber's founders, will also use what some have dubbed "conversational commerce" to sell anything from clothes to toys.

Like asking a friend Among the many ways to communicate on a smartphone, texting's appeal has endured thanks to its immediacy, speed, flexibility and ubiquity. Even the biggest tech ingenue probably knows how to text. While Lark and Luka replicate SMS-style chat in an app, Magic, Cloe and Alexis operate over regular texting channels, so there is no software to download and no new interface to learn.

Unlike the iPhone's robotic assistant Siri, using Cloe and Alexis is just like asking a friend for a recommendation. Responses are chatty and friendly, in part because they are staffed by real people, not an artificial intelligence. As Cloe put it to me: "I'm real as a Georgia peach."

But that does mean they are as fallible as people, too, at least so far. The human component of Alexis, which offers "advice for the modern man", responded to a request for entertainment suggestions to say his phone was "blowin' up"; two weeks later he came back online, with some interesting theatre recommendations.

Cloemade some smart suggestions about where to watch a baseball game and places to eat in San Francisco's Japantown. However, one Sunday morning question met with the endearing but unhelpful: "Cloe got stuck in line for brunch, she'll be back soon."

That is unlikely to be a problem for Luka, which uses AI to respond to text-based questions about places to go and things to do. Luka made the same sports bar recommendation as Cloe, drawing on information from local apps such as Foursquare and Yelp.

Whether human or robot, the services are doing little more than Googling for you; part of the appeal is that one strong recommendation can sometimes be more helpful than a bewildering list of options.

Magic momentsRemoving complexity is also the driving force behind Magic, the most ambitious of the new texting services, and the one holding the most potential.

There are now on-demand delivery services for almost anything, especially here in San Francisco. Magic acts as a single gateway to them all. Register your credit card details when placing the first order and Magic's team of concierges does the rest.

The service was created as a weekend sideline but its founders are hiring operators and building backend systems that can augment and automate its responses to the huge range of potential requests.

In a conversation comprising nine texts, I ordered three house plants, which were delivered within a few hours, for about $5 above their purchase price. Having also tried and failed to find what I wanted on other delivery services, such as Google Express or Instacart, I could have gone to a service such as Postmates or TaskRabbit, but Magic saved me time in instructing the couriers and in managing any questions along the way.

However, it remains to be seen whether services such as Magic and Operator can work at scale. Magic's flurry of early adopters has created a waiting list of tens of thousands and the founders say artificial intelligence technology is not yet sophisticated enough to help them field all these texts. But even if there is no wizard behind the curtain, Magic's technology delivers convenience in the simplest and most intuitive way possible. The humble text message has never been more powerful.

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