Instinct
Instinct is an AI agent from Spear Street that handles travel bookings and everyday errands by text or call. You reach it over WhatsApp, iMessage, or email, and it works across your connected apps and devices.
Understanding Instinct
Instinct works where you already text. There is no app to learn and no dashboard to check. You send a message about a flight, a booking, or an errand, and the agent works through it for you.
The product has grown through a waitlist, focused on nailing travel and errands before expanding further. That narrow focus is the point: Instinct wants to be the fastest way to hand off a task by text.
Text agents trade openness for convenience. Instinct connects to email, messages, calendar, and devices, and stores your preferences. The tradeoff is control: it is a closed, invite-only product you cannot inspect or run yourself.
How GAIA Uses Instinct
GAIA meets you in the same places: it works in WhatsApp and Telegram, not just on the web. The difference is control. GAIA is source-available and self-hostable with deep integrations, so a trip it books connects to your schedule, your inbox, and your tasks in a system you can inspect.
Related Concepts
AI Assistant
An AI assistant is software that understands requests in plain language and then acts on them: it answers questions, but it also drafts and sends email, schedules meetings, tracks tasks and runs multi-step workflows inside the apps you already use. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT and GAIA are all AI assistants; what separates them is how much real work each one can do on your behalf.
AI Agent
An AI agent is an autonomous software system that perceives its environment, reasons about what to do, and takes actions to achieve specific goals without continuous human direction.
Proactive AI
Proactive AI is AI that acts before you ask: it watches for events (a new email, an upcoming meeting, a deadline), decides when something needs attention, and starts the work or alerts you on its own. Reactive AI is the opposite: it does nothing until you send a prompt or a command, and then it responds.
Context Awareness
Context awareness in AI is the ability to understand the full situation surrounding a task or interaction, including who is involved, what has happened before, related projects, deadlines, and the user's preferences and patterns.
