How does one go about developing a personal assistant, like Magic or GoButler, via text messaging?

How does one go about developing a personal assistant, like Magic or GoButler, via text messaging?

I would put these under the category of “SMS Bots”. These bots may be fully automated, or semi-automated using a “Mechanical Turk” model. Basically, the “intelligence” behind it is more or less that same as any chatbot or “virtual assistant”. The only difference is that SMS is the channel, or carrier; for instance, any engine you could use with IRC or Instant Messaging would also work with SMS. There are plenty of services now offering access to SMS via API. There were earlier versions of these kinds of SMS “bots”, such as askbongo.com.