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.
Hey Product Hunt, I built Bert because I wanted a better assistant for my text messages, and I got tired of waiting Apple to make Siri smart.
So much important stuff lives in text threads: someone’s new address, a friend's baby's name, a plan for Saturday, a message you meant to reply to and forgot. I wanted a tool that could search my messages locally, use an agent to surface buried details, turn loose plans into reminders or calendar events, and help me close the loop on conversations I missed.
Bert runs on your Mac, and you bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key for AI features. There's no hosted backend, and it's fully open sourced, with minimal permissions for the agent. Your messages stay on your computer. It (optionally) integrates with Apple Reminders, which can be accessed directly on your phone.
It uses Hugging Face to create a local vectorized version of your messages in PGLite, allowing for better agentic search.
Basically, Bert does all the things that I wish Siri could do.
Would love your feedback — especially on where it feels useful, weird, or unfinished.
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
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!!
Interesting. I don't use iMessage that much though, mostly Whatsapp. Is there a benefit of using iMessage?
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
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
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!
nice idea but I barely receive or do any message (its personal) All of my conversations are on whatsapp
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
