szn: The iMessage AI Agent With Its Own Phone Number
szn, pronounced “season,” is a personal AI agent that lives in an iMessage thread. It comes from Nikhil Gupta, an engineer who worked on Siri and Apple Intelligence at Apple, through a company called Nomadic Futures, Inc. Early access is open now and free during the preview. The wider launch is set for October 2026, with a dedicated app to follow.
The idea that got it covered by MacDailyNews, iPhone in Canada and PhoneArena in the same weekend is the identity model. Each customer gets an assistant with its own name, its own email address and its own phone number. It calls the restaurant, emails the contractor and replies to the group chat as a digital representative of you, and you stay in one thread with it.
What szn does
The site frames the product around everything that comes after deciding to do something: the email, the phone call, the follow-up, finding a time, remembering what you already said, checking again tomorrow. You send a text, a voice note, a photo or a forwarded email into one thread. szn takes it from there, and you hear back when there is a decision to make.
The use cases it lists are personal. Plan the trip and then book it. Handle the calendar. Make the call without making the call. Get plans out of the group chat. Wake up already caught up. Keep an eye on something. Send the email without sending the email. It browses websites and completes purchases, and the launch coverage says it will work with shared Apple Notes, Find My and iCloud files. The site says it has already reached businesses in 16 countries.
Logins live in what szn calls a secure vault: encrypted credentials the agent decrypts and uses during a task, which you can delete at any time.
How it scored in independent testing
assistantbenchmark.com tested szn on 13 of its 15 categories through September 23 and scored it 8.2 out of 10 overall, the best result of the new personal agents in this wave. It placed a real call to a restaurant and reported back seating for eight, a semi-private room and no minimum spend. It applied a saved aisle-seat preference and a no-pork rule on a new flight and dinner request without being reminded. Median reply time was 39 seconds.
The partial marks are the ones that matter for work. On the email test it could not reach the user’s inbox, so it drafted a reply declining Thursday with two alternative slots and held it for approval. Third-party integrations, permissions and chained tasks also scored partial.
szn pricing
szn is free during the early preview. No plans or prices are published. No funding or investors have been disclosed.
Privacy, and the Apple question
Gupta has said each customer gets a dedicated model and that personal data will not be used for training. The privacy policy says szn does not sell personal information, does not use Google data for advertising, and deletes Google data when you delete the tasks or your account. Authorized staff may access task data for support. The acceptable use policy is blunt about consequences: tasks create real-world actions, and you are responsible for reviewing and confirming them.
The open question is Apple. Apple has shut down third-party services built on iMessage before, and every launch story raises it. szn’s answer is a dedicated app later. The iMessage thread is how it starts.
Where szn fits
szn is the most polished version of the assistant-with-its-own-number idea, and the benchmark backs the demo. For personal errands, especially the ones that need a phone call, it is the one to watch in October.
Work runs on a different rule. A client reply has to come from your address, not the assistant’s. A calendar change has to land on your calendar and your colleague’s. A lead that arrives at 2am has to trigger something without anyone texting a task. That is what Carly is built for: it works inside your Gmail or Outlook, sends as you, watches for events and runs workflows on them, and connects to thousands of apps through official connections. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Get started here.
For the full field, see szn alternatives, and for the head-to-head, Carly vs szn. The other launch of the week, Wajo’s Fo, is covered in Wajo’s Fo explained.
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