A chatbot answers questions. A personal AI agent gets access to your accounts and tools and finishes the job for you: booking a ticket, comparing prices, replying to email. The difference is whether it can act, and who is responsible when it gets something wrong. This page collects my English articles on agents by question and is updated monthly.
Eight personal AI agents compared (updated monthly)
A short version of the table. Prices, availability, payments and passwords are in the full personal AI agents comparison (last verified 2026-10-25). In “Best for”, entries marked “my judgment” are my opinion; the rest follow the vendor.
| Product | Company | Access | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Duet | Anthropic (source) | Standalone iOS/Android app and claude.ai (source) | Officially for professionals and small business owners (source) |
| Dot | OpenAI (source) | ChatGPT apps, desktop app and desktop web (source); also in Slack and Teams (source) | People already on ChatGPT Pro who want an always-on agent inside ChatGPT (my judgment) |
| Gemini Spark (Google’s help page says it is now called Task) | Google (source) | Gemini mobile app, Mac app and gemini.google.com (source) | People whose work and life already run on Google apps (my judgment) |
| Grok Bot | xAI, hosted by Cursor (source, source) | Desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux; iOS and Android (source) | Official positioning: several named bots working in parallel and splitting work in group chats (source) |
| Instinct | Spear Street Technology, Inc. d/b/a Instinct (source) | Text or call it (source) | People who want errands done just by texting or calling (my judgment) |
| Muse | Meta (source) | Muse app, WhatsApp, muse.ai (source) | People who want help managing their goals, ideas and daily life (my judgment) |
| Hermes Agent (open source) | Nous Research (source) | Desktop apps; Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, CLI (source) | People who want to choose their own model and machine (source) |
| OpenClaw (open source) | OpenClaw Foundation (source) | macOS, Windows, Linux; 29 chat channels (source) | People who want to self-host everything (source, source) |
Articles by question
Choosing one
- Which personal AI agent should I use? One table comparing access, price, availability, payments and passwords for eight agents. → Personal AI agents compared
- Is a personal agent selling productivity or time? They are two businesses: one priced against your hourly value and sold on proven ROI, the other against the value of your free time. → Personal agents split into two markets
- What should a personal agent’s entry point and interaction look like? The entry point buys the habit; the interaction buys the trust. → Personal agents: the entry point buys the habit, the interaction buys the trust
Risks
- Is there anything risky in the Skills I have installed? I built skill-risk-checkup, an open-source Skill that runs a read-only risk check on installed agent Skills (my X post, in Chinese). → GitHub: LiamZJU/skill-risk-checkup
Product judgment
- How do you accept an agent the way you accept a driver-assistance feature? Write the grading contract before the prompt and judge the system’s end state. → Eval as spec
- What review should a new agent capability pass? Agent capability is capped by how much the receiving organisation can verify. → An agent’s shippable capability is set at the review gate
Digital agents and Physical AI: the same delivery problem
Physical AI and digital agents look like two worlds, but shipping either as a product runs into the same problem: model capability sets the ceiling, and the unglamorous work decides whether it ships. In autonomous driving that work is corner cases and the data loop; for agents it is authentication, fault tolerance, state management and unreliable third-party APIs. Demos run on the model; products run on that work (my X post, in Chinese).
Two articles on Physical AI safety from an ADAS point of view:
- Human in the loop is not a robot safety specification, and ADAS already proved it
- Eiliko’s 68,000 reachable robots show consumer robotics has no R155
Where I follow agent news
The English-language agent accounts I follow are in the English agents section of my X accounts list (the page is in Chinese; account names and posts are linked).
FAQ
What is the difference between a personal AI agent and ChatGPT?
Chat assistants like ChatGPT mainly answer questions. A personal agent acts for you: it signs in to sites, fills in forms, places orders and sends email. Most of the hosted products in the comparison give the agent its own cloud computer or virtual machine (see the comparison).
What’s the difference between Claude Skills and MCP?
A Skill packages instructions, metadata and optional scripts or templates that the agent uses automatically when they are relevant (Anthropic docs). MCP is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external data sources, tools and workflows (MCP docs). They are not alternatives: an agent can use a Skill to decide how to do a task, then call tools, some of them over MCP.
Which personal AI agent should I use?
It depends on where you already work and how much control you want. I use Grok Bot; the comparison suggests Muse or Instinct if you want a secretary for daily life, and the open-source Hermes Agent or OpenClaw if you want to choose your own model and machine.
Is it safe to give an agent my passwords?
It depends on how it handles them. The official pages for Claude Duet, Dot, Grok Bot and Muse say the model or bot does not see your passwords, and payments mostly use one-time virtual cards or ask you to confirm first. The open-source products do not document this, so you have to design it yourself. Details and sources are in the comparison’s security section.
How often is this page updated?
Monthly. For the comparison table, the “last verified” date on the comparison page is the reference.
Changelog
- 2026-10-26: page published.
About the author: I’m Liam Ding (丁洪), an Autonomous Driving Product Manager at NVIDIA; see my bio. I use Grok Bot myself (“I choose Grok Bot”, in Chinese). The choices and “my judgment” entries here and in the comparison are my personal views, not my employer’s.