Jarvis is Iron Man/Tony Stark's computer assistant in the movies.

Jarvis is the long-time butler of the Avengers mansion. That's where they took the name for the movie.

That's embarrassing, I know characters from books in the 1800s but not movies in the last decade.

like who from the books?

Well, Jeeves. The gentleman's personal gentleman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves

I don't see why they would need to interface with iMessage at all. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it just seems like they're responding to text messages sent to a particular number.

I think iMessage is a smart choice. it lets their customers communicate via a Mac, iPod, or iPad in addition to an iPhone. Text messages also cost me money, so not having to worry about that is another selling point.

It also makes scaling their side of the system easier. Instead of having some sort of CRM/SMS gateway system, they can just hook however many Macs they want to to their account, and all messages sent to it will get copied to all of them. This makes it easy to hand off a communication session between agents in a way that's transparent to the users of the service.

Of course, the downside is that it's an Apple-only protocol, so they will be prematurely excluding users of non-Apple devices, but maybe that's a tradeoff that the company's willing to make at this time.

the screenshot they put on the homepage suggests that it does interface with iMessage?

AppleScript can interface with iMessage, so it's certainly possible to magic up an interface.

The screenshots I see just show a regular text message conversation.

Blue bubbles are for iMessage, green is for SMS.

It also says "iMessage" at the top of the conversation.

Good point. I didn't notice this distinction (I'm not current an iOS user). Although they claim you're communicating with humans, so they could potentially just be using iMessage at their current scale. Or the screenshots could be from a simple fully manual demo.

Maybe the concierge is using a Mac, or an ipad with Bluetooth keyboard, or a Hackintosh?

Couldn't you script iMessage on OS X with AppleScript, and thereby allow multiple people to interact with the same instance?

They're not. "Jarvis is a tech enabled person. You will be assigned two US based, college educated personal assistants..."

The service sort of implies otherwise. If it's a phone number they'll get texts and iMessages. If they're using the feature that forwards iMessages to an AppleID the SIM must be in an iPhone, and I hardly think they'd reply to every SMS from a single iPhone.

The easier answer is that the screenshots are faked and not actually sent through the service; they probably just renamed a real contact who happened to have an iPhone 'Jarvis' for the purpose of making screenshots.

All the screenshots have timestamps a few minutes apart showing a plugged-in iPhone with an increasing charge over the course of a few minutes.

iMessage (well, Messages.app) is scriptable on the Mac via AppleScript (see https://github.com/lazerwalker/hubot-imessage). Figuring out how to scale it might be tricky, but for the time being they could be using some Mac scripts to intercept the iMessages, shoot them off to the appropriate assistant via some other interface, and then send the resulting iMessages back through the same Mac interface.

it's not hard to set up a proxy and just sniff the traffic to reconstruct the protocol

It's obfuscated and very complicated.

http://imfreedom.org/wiki/IMessage

It must be kind of hard, because nobody has reverse engineered it enough to build a reimplementation of the client.

Someone has, actually [1]. Dozens of people also seem to have at least partial implementations.

[1] http://imessageonandroid.com/

Really? Do you know what you linked to?

Have you actually gotten an APK from that site?

It looks like a 100% fake site that takes you through never ending scam surveys and sign ups.

That one could be wrong, I don't have an Android phone anymore, and stopped following pretty much all things Android. However I've personally used an iMessage app on Android a few years back. They definitely exist.