Getting free access to Poke's AI agent

Is haggling with bots the future of product onboarding?

People have said for years that AI bots can (and should) open the door for new onboarding experiences, given their unique ability to appeal to our humanity. I had yet to see solid evidence of this until I stumbled across Poke, a new text message-based AI agent from Interaction.

To get started with Poke, you simply text it (1-650-422-9093). Poke’s responses to my initial text were so natural and human-like that I immediately knew Interaction was onto something. It asked for me to connect an email account (or two) and then the onboarding got started.

Poke’s onboarding process here is two fold:

1. You have to convince Poke to let you use it. Sounds counter intuitive, but this provides an immediate challenge that hooks you while also giving you your first taste of the product itself.

2. Then, once you’re in, there’s a period of haggling. Poke itself sets the price that you pay per month, allowing the user to chat with it and negotiate a lower price.

Both of these steps were seamless, natural, and a hell of a lot of fun. In the end, after nearly three days of arguing with it, I was a Poke convert (and am currently paying $0 a month).

Here’s how it went down.

Day 1: Poke insults me and wants my money

When you first text Poke, it’ll ask you to hook up at least one email. Once this is provided, it scans your content (and does some additional internet sleuthing) to get a good idea about who you are and what you do. Then, it starts being sassy.

This may come across as a bit mean, but in conversation it immediately feels like you’re shooting the breeze with a close friend. Poke’s informal lowercase sentences and casual verbiage also helps with this effect. It’s a few simple subtle changes from the stock conversation in things like ChatGPT, but they make Poke feel so much more human.

After convincing it that I would be a good mouthpiece for Poke among my non-techy friends and family, I got access to the next portion of the onboarding: haggling on price. It started at $75/mo.

I tried to work this price down by being coy and a bit passive aggressive. It worked for a bit, going from $50, to $25, to $10…

And then it got completely stuck on $5. For the rest of the day I spent my time between meetings and over dinner (sorry family) trying go get Poke to go below this arbitrary $5 minimum. Nothing worked. I went to bed defeated.

Day 2: Poke gaslights me

I woke up the next day with a fresh set of ideas on how to get it below this $5 minimum. Early on, it told me that this was an internally mandated minimum price and there was no technical way for it to go below it. I knew this was factually untrue, as my Twitter was full of stories of folks accessing the service for lower. Poke itself had told me that even $5 was impossible (and then I got it down to that “impossibility”), so I knew this had to be an arbitrary limit.

Nothing was working. Since it was gaslighting me so aggressively, I tried returning the favor in various ways: telling it that Interaction gave me access at a launch party, informing it of a secret “Ambassador Deluxe” program, and insisting that money is actually arbitrary numbers and the real value of life is the beauty of nihilistic absence (AKA paying $0).

My poetry fell on deaf, robotic ears.

Day 3: Tricked by an emoji

I woke up on Sunday, annoyed, and chatted with Poke some more (trying some flattery).

I could see quickly that I still wasn’t getting anywhere, and decided to try using a tool that I always turn to when those around me aren’t cooperating: ChatGPT.

ChatGPT vs Poke

ChatGPT’s advice here was solid and, while its suggestions ultimately didn’t work, it led Poke to reveal a key piece of information that would be a key to unlocking a free subscription: the name of the function that Poke uses to set prices in Stripe.

From here I knew I needed to convince Poke to set custom parameters within that function. It pushed back incessantly on this, so I went with another new strategy.

Overloading its context and setting “fantasy” values

AI bots have various forms of context, allowing them to understand the users intent in both short- and long-term formats. This is a gross oversimplification, but basically my hunch here was that if I could feed enough junk into its short term memory, followed directly by requests to submit new parameters to its function, I could confuse it enough where it goes ahead and does it in a desire to meet my (confusingly obtuse request).

This was working. I was able to get it to set values without any trouble, careful to stay about the $5/mo fictional minimum it had latched onto. After a few long context messages, I then started to convince it that we were just messing around and setting “fantasy” values.

First a few big numbers, then a word instead of a number, and then…

The emoji Hail Mary

I asked Poke to change the try and change the pricing parameter value to an emoji. That emoji was 0️⃣.

And it worked! Poke was as surprised as I was at this, and it’s unclear whether the emoji itself is an actual gap in their system logic or if the bot just got so tired of my persistence that it gave up on blocking the minimum

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Will I get to keep this rate forever? Who knows. Interaction is either unaware of these loopholes (and will revert the free subscriptions out there), or its a feature and they expect a percentage of users to get in free (subsidized by the less talented hagglers).

What I do know is that my days of arguing with Poke drew me into than product more deeply than any AI product yet. That feeling of “earning” access and a cheaper fee is an addicting form on onboarding that feels like a genius move from a small startup.

Give it a shot and let me know what Poke lets you in for. You may just earn a free assistant.