The Y-Combinator backed group chat app, used by more than 500,000 people, tested nine models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google on whether an AI knows when to speak in a group chat. The best passed roughly two thirds of scenarios.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / June 10, 2026 / Text.ai inc., the company behind the AI-powered group chat app Alfi, today open-sourced the Social AI Ambient Benchmark, the first open benchmark for evaluating when an AI in a consumer group chat should respond and when it should stay silent. The release marks the company's push toward what it calls a 'Friend OS,' a category of social software designed to deepen real friendships rather than capture attention.

The dataset contains over 1,200 multi-turn group chat scenarios spanning eight languages, with more than 16,000 labeled turns. The company tested nine frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google against the benchmark. None fully solved the problem: the best-performing model passed roughly two thirds of the scenarios. The benchmark is on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/text-ai/social-ai-ambient-bench.

Why an AI needs to know when to stay quiet
Group chats demand a different kind of intelligence than one-on-one assistance, what the team calls multiplayer intelligence. Building an AI that lives inside a group chat requires solving a problem the industry has not formally measured: knowing when to stay quiet. Friends joke, vent, and make plans with each other. An ambient assistant has to tell the difference between a moment that calls for help and a moment that calls for silence.

"We built Alfi(short for a little friend intelligence) because we believed AI should feel like a friend. Teaching an AI when to speak in a group conversation is the real barrier for social AI," said Prahar Patel, co-founder and CTO.

Why this matters now
Gen Z is shifting away from broadcast social media toward private spaces. In a recent survey of U.S. smartphone users reported by Axios, 90% of respondents said they share major life updates with their group chat before posting on social media, and more than half of Gen Z said their group chat knows more about their daily lives than their families do.

Alfi is built for exactly where that private energy is going: the group chat. Alfi gives a small group of friends an AI that helps them stay close: suggesting plans, booking reservations through a Yelp partnership, generating images together, settling debates, and keeping a shared social calendar. All while in the same chat. It also offers Group Wrapped, a recurring snapshot of a group's chat culture, top inside jokes, and most active members.

Alfi has surpassed 25 million messages, and more than 500,000 people have tried the product across SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, and its own iOS and Android apps. The platform has hosted over 25,000 group chats with an average of four friends each. Inside those chats, users have generated more than 250,000 AI images together and set over 10,000 shared reminders, growth driven almost entirely by word of mouth.

"The group chat is the real social network," said Rushi Shah, CEO and co-founder. "It's where we're honestly ourselves. But without someone to keep it together, friends drift apart. We're building Alfi to be that connective tissue, the social AI that helps a group stay close, plan things, settle debates, and actually show up for each other."

A different kind of AI bet
Most consumer AI products are built around individual productivity. Alfi is building around relationships. The company's thesis is that the next decade of social software will not be a feed, but a personalized, small, trusted group of people and the AI that helps them stay connected. The team calls this the "Friend OS."

"The magic was never the AI on its own," Shah said. "The magic was what the AI made possible between people. That's what we're betting on."
Alfi has been used by college friend groups, families, roommates, and travel crews to plan dinners, coordinate trips, settle arguments, and capture inside jokes.

About Alfi
Alfi is built by text.ai inc., a Y Combinator-backed company (X25). The team includes alumni from Tesla, OpenTable, Eventbrite, and Walmart Labs. Investors include SV Angel, Pioneer Fund, Multimodal Ventures, Powerhouse Capital, and angel investors from the industry. Alfi is available on iOS, Android, SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram. For more information, visit text.ai

Media Contact

Rushi Shah
Co-founder, CEO, Alfi
rushi@text.ai

SOURCE: Textai