How Town puts a personal AI assistant one text away with Linq
Town uses Linq to bring its AI assistants into iMessage, helping people manage work and everyday life through conversations.
A business owner reviewing supplier costs. A parent coordinating school schedules. A team keeping track of what needs to happen next. Each needs an assistant that understands the details and can help get things done.
That’s what Town is building. Everyone who joins gets a personal AI assistant called a Townie, complete with a name and personality they choose. Townies learn how people work, connect to their tools, and help with everything from email and meeting preparation to recurring tasks. The experience is designed around an assistant that gets to know you over time.
For Town, making that assistant useful also meant making it easy to reach. That led the team to texting—and to Linq.
“You also want to be a text message away from your AI system.”
— Jean-Denis Greze, CEO and co-founder, Town
Town’s assistant started with email. The team then expanded into Slack, mobile and desktop apps, WhatsApp, and Telegram. As they explored how people wanted to interact with their Townies, text messaging became a clear priority.
The reason was already visible in their customers’ routines. Small business owners were texting coworkers and suppliers. Families were coordinating their lives in group chats. An assistant that could participate in those conversations would fit naturally into the way people already got things done.
Linq provides the infrastructure behind Town’s iMessage and text messaging channel, connecting users with their Townies in the messaging app they already use. Town brings the assistant’s context and capabilities; Linq powers the message delivery that makes that assistant reachable by text.
For Greze, choosing that infrastructure partner came down to reliability and attention to detail. Before co-founding Town, he spent years at Dropbox and Plaid, including serving as Plaid’s CTO. He understood what it meant to build a product on infrastructure another team operates—and what he needed from that team.
“We knew you would care about reliability and details that would allow us to build a world class product.”
That foundation supports a wide range of everyday uses. In the interview, Greze describes small and midsize businesses using Town to identify supplier price increases. Their Townies review the information and surface changes that may warrant a conversation or a different supplier, helping owners keep up with work that otherwise requires repeated manual review.
People have also brought their Townies into family logistics: organizing school schedules, keeping track of camps, and maintaining shared to-do and grocery lists. Town’s group texting feature lets multiple people and their assistants participate in the same thread. A request can happen right where the family is already discussing it.
Those interactions revealed something significant to the Town team. People were developing relationships with their assistants.
“We saw almost immediately the users started to build effectively a relationship with the Townees.”
Giving an assistant a name is only the beginning. Remembering a detail, helping with a recurring responsibility, and being available when something comes up make that relationship useful. Texting gives people a familiar way to keep it going.
That also points toward Town’s next ambition: richer experiences where multiple people and AI assistants work together. Greze describes a future in which those interactions reflect what different people want from technology and help them get their lives and work done.
With Linq powering its iMessage and texting experience, Town is bringing that vision into an everyday habit: reaching for your phone, opening a conversation, and asking for what you need.
