Task Bert - Fully local open-source agent for managing your texts
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Bert is the private iMessage assistant that I want Siri to be. Search your messages locally on your Mac to find buried details, turn loose plans into reminders or calendar events, and get nudged to follow up on conversations that slipped through the cracks. Bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key for AI features, so your message history stays on-device and under your control – no middle man, and fully open sourced.
Replies
Task Bert
@ann_baum Hi. Fully local agent for texts, how fast does it work on an old laptop?
Task Bert
@julia_zakharova2 good question — the vector embedding uses Hugging Face locally and that can definitely take a few minutes during onboarding to get set up.
For the agentic tool calling, that is wired up to Anthropic/OpenAI directly since those models were much better than the ones I tested with.
Definitely explored having it fully local but agree on lower end laptops performance would start to be an issue. Decided that using better models with controlled tool exposure was a trade off I was comfortable with.
This is super helpful lol, I'm always forgetting addresses, birthdays, friend's baby's name as well and it takes forever scrolling up. Reminders not so much personally, but searching iMessages is great in itself. Are you planning to build out a version for iPhone? Not sure how to address permissions and whatnot, but I would love to use it on mobile
Task Bert
@chris_u_han Totally agreed that getting it on mobile is ideal – for now, I wanted to keep it fully isolated on my machine so didn't go too far down that road. I think best option is for an Open Claw or Claude Code with an SMS gateway, and exposing this tool via MCP to those. I have the agentic "ask" as a tool explicitly for that purpose.
Love how you lean into local BYO API key instead of yet another cloud inbox assistant. The whole thing gives a feeling Siri should have been a while ago
Task Bert
@artstavenka1 yup – especially in the current state of the world.... did not feel like trusting a new unvetted cloud solution, but didn't see anything on the market that fit my needs here.
Finally! An assistant that can search through all our lengthly texts. Well-done on beating Apple to it!
No excuses on forgetting birthdays, shopping lists or invitations that "got lost in the mail" lol
Task Bert
@kelly_lee_zeeman thanks – and exactly!! Inspired by true events [me scheduling two dinners on the same evening]
Offsite
I always struggle so much with iMessage searching - I think Apple broke it in iOS26. So I'm really glad to see this solution out there!
Task Bert
@naveensharma appreciate it! And totally agreed.... trying to find information makes me crazy.
This is so awesome. I'm a new mom and I've been getting so many texts from friends checking in mixed with doctor appointment reminders and everything is falling through the cracks...You don't even want to know what my email inbox looks like lol. So this is amazing to have my texts all broken down into a checklist!!
Task Bert
@maddy_baum1 yes! so much goes down in the inbox... need better tools to manage it all!
nice idea but I barely receive or do any message (its personal) All of my conversations are on whatsapp
brag.fast
Interesting. I don't use iMessage that much though, mostly Whatsapp. Is there a benefit of using iMessage?
Task Bert
@rob_vb very broadly speaking WhatsApp tends to be preferred internationally while iMessage is more common in US. I'm not trying to convince people to adopt one vs the other, just trying to address the functionality limitations in iMessage for those of us who do use it!
ProdShort
The killer feature is to have this combine all my messaging apps. I believe Europe tried to impose an API to all messaging platform but it didn't pass. But there is some opensource projects that works around it