Connecting Every Channel: Email, iMessage, and Beyond
The Interface Problem
We had built intelligence that could genuinely help. Scheduling, email drafting, calendar management, relationship tracking—all the capabilities we'd developed over months.
But capabilities mean nothing if people can't access them.
The whole point of Consul Agent is to meet people where they already are. Not in a new app. Not in a separate dashboard. Right there in the tools they use every day.
That meant we needed to work through email, iMessage/SMS, and web—each with its own challenges, each requiring specialized infrastructure.
Email: Where Work Actually Happens
Email was our first and most important channel.
Think about it: email is still the default interface for professional communication. You probably have Gmail open right now. You'll check it 20+ times today. It's the one app that everyone, everywhere, already uses.
What if talking to your AI assistant was as simple as sending an email?
That's exactly what we built. You get a Consul Agent email address—something like alex@youragent.consul.so. Email that address, and you're talking to your assistant.
"Hey, can you schedule a call with Sarah next week? She's in EST, I'm in PST, we need about an hour."
Your agent checks both calendars, finds overlapping availability, proposes times, handles the back-and-forth, and confirms the meeting. All through email.
The key: it looks like a normal email conversation. Proper threading. Professional formatting. No weird app notifications or context switches. Just email, doing what email does, but smarter.
We built robust email infrastructure to handle all the hard stuff—deliverability, spam prevention, proper email headers, threading. Our emails land in inboxes, not spam folders. They look like they're from a human assistant, not an automated system.
The result: 99.9% deliverability, under 2 seconds from your email to agent response.
iMessage: For Everything Else
Email is great for detailed requests. But sometimes you just need to fire off a quick text.
"Remind me to call John tomorrow at 2pm"
That's not an email. That's a text message. Something you can send while walking to your car or waiting in line for coffee.
We added iMessage and SMS support. Real iMessage—not SMS fallback—with all the features people expect: typing indicators, read receipts, rich formatting.
Text your Consul Agent phone number, and you're having a conversation with your assistant. Same intelligence, different interface.
Under 1 second message latency. You send a text, you get a response before you've put your phone back in your pocket.
The verification flow is simple: during onboarding, you verify your phone number. After that, any text from your number goes straight to your agent. No login required. No authentication flow. Just text and go.
Same Intelligence, Different Styles
Here's where it gets interesting: the same request gets different responses depending on the channel.
Via Email (detailed):
Subject: RE: Schedule lunch tomorrow
Hi there!
I found three times that work for both you and John:
• Tomorrow (Wed Jan 8) at 12:00 PM
• Tomorrow at 12:30 PM
• Tomorrow at 1:00 PMAll times are at Café Milano (123 Main St). I can book any of these—just reply with your preference.
Best,
Alex
Your Consul Agent
Via iMessage (concise):
Found 3 lunch times tomorrow:
- 12:00pm
- 12:30pm
- 1:00pm
Which one? (reply 1, 2, or 3)
Same intelligence, same information, but adapted to how people actually use each channel. Emails can be longer and more formal. Texts should be quick and scannable.
Via Web Chat (interactive):
The web interface can show a calendar widget with available slots. One click to book. Visual confirmation. The full experience when you want it.
The Magic of Multi-Channel
The real power isn't any single channel—it's how they work together.
Scenario: You're in a meeting and get an important email that needs scheduling. You can't open Gmail without looking distracted. But you can glance at your phone.
So you text your agent: "Did I get an email from David? What does he need?"
Agent responds: "Yes, David asked about scheduling a call this week. Want me to propose some times?"
You text back: "Yes, Thursday afternoon works."
Agent sends David an email with Thursday afternoon options—properly formatted, from your agent's email address, with your calendar link. David books a time. The event appears on your calendar.
You never opened an app. You never left your meeting. The coordination just happened.
Technical Foundation (The Short Version)
Making this work required solving some genuinely hard problems:
Unified context: Your agent remembers you across all channels. Text a reminder in the morning, reference it in an email that afternoon. The agent knows.
Channel-appropriate responses: The same intelligence adapts its style—detailed for email, concise for text, interactive for web.
Reliable delivery: Webhooks with retry logic, dead-letter queues for failed messages, automatic fallbacks if one channel is down.
Speed: Email webhooks respond in under 2 seconds. iMessage in under 1 second. Web chat in under 100ms. Fast enough that it feels like talking to a person, not waiting for a system.
What We Learned Building This
A few lessons from connecting every channel:
Channel choice is personal. Some people are email-first. Some prefer texting. Some want the web interface. Don't force people into one pattern—let them choose.
Consistency matters. Your agent should feel like the same assistant across every channel. Same voice. Same knowledge. Same reliability.
Speed is non-negotiable. If the response takes more than a few seconds, people assume something's broken. Every channel needs to be fast.
Focus on what matters. Building great channel infrastructure takes time and expertise. We invested heavily in making each channel reliable and fast so you can focus on getting things done.
The Numbers
Our channel infrastructure now delivers:
- Email: 99.9% deliverability, under 2s latency
- iMessage: 99.8% delivery rate, under 1s latency
- Web Chat: under 100ms response time
Reliable enough that you can depend on it for real work. Fast enough that it feels natural.
Next up: The final stretch—production infrastructure, security, billing, and getting ready to launch.