How Iri compares
Iri gets mistaken for two different things: a personal AI assistant that you happen to use with someone else, and a shared household planner with a chatbot attached. It is neither, and the difference in both cases is the same one.
Against a personal AI assistant
A personal assistant is built around one person. It answers you, it remembers your history, and it knows the other people in your life only as characters you have described to it. That is the right choice for your own work, your own drafts and your own questions, and it is why we say to keep using one for those: the email you are drafting, the form you are trying to decode, the thing you want to think through before you say it out loud.
It breaks down the moment a decision involves somebody else. Everything it knows about the other person is secondhand, arriving through you and already filtered. Two people using the same assistant separately end up with two assistants that each know half of the story and neither of which knows what was agreed. There is no shared thread to be the record, so the record is whoever remembers it better.
Iri is in the conversation instead of on one side of it. It hears both people first-hand, it knows who said which thing, and the memory it keeps is a single shared record that everyone can read and anyone can correct. When it acts, it acts in front of everybody.
Against a shared household planner
Shared calendars, shared lists and chore apps solve a real problem, and they solve it well: everyone gets one place to look, and nobody has to ask what the plan is. If what your group needs is a tidy shared list, one of those is a perfectly good answer.
What they have in common is that somebody still has to do the entering. The plan exists in the group chat first, and then someone transcribes it into the app, and the app is accurate for exactly as long as that person keeps doing it. The AI features bolted onto that shape are usually parsing help: a smarter way to type a task in.
Iri inverts it. The conversation is the input, and the list, the meal plan, the trip and the reminder are what it produces. It can also do the parts a list cannot do at all: look things up, weigh two options against a budget you set earlier, remember why you chose the one you chose, and act on it.
Side by side
| Personal AI | Shared planner | Iri | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | One person | A group, but no AI participant | A group, with one AI in it |
| What it hears | Your side, retold | Whatever is typed in | The conversation itself, first-hand |
| Memory | Yours alone | Whatever someone entered | Shared, listed, editable by anyone in it |
| Where it lives | Its own app | Its own app | Your existing group text, plus an app |
| Who has to type | You, to catch it up | Someone, every time | Nobody; the thread is the input |
| Can it look things up and act | Yes, for you | Rarely | Yes, in front of everyone, and undoably |
| Pricing shape | Per person | Per person or per family | Per group, one subscriber |
When Iri is the wrong answer
- You want an assistant for your own work, drafts and questions. That is a personal AI, and Iri does not replace it or read it.
- Nobody in the group wants an AI in the thread. Participation can be turned down to nearly silent, but if the answer is zero, a shared list app is the simpler thing.
- You need one shared calendar and nothing else. Iri does more than that, and you would be paying for the rest.
Common questions covers how it works in a group text, and pricing starts free with no card, and is by group size rather than per seat.