From Muse to Instinct to Dots, tech companies are exploring the user experiences that make AI personal assistants must-have products.
Hark, a startup founded less than a year ago by serial founder Brett Adcock, is fulfilling its commitment today with the wide release of Hark Pro. Users can access the service for free, with subscription tiers available for heavy users.
The company sees its mission as building user interfaces for AI, not creating AGI or curing cancer. The foundation is a model trained specifically for computer use, and that’s what Hark Pro does. Use a computer instead of a user.
This is probably not as ambitious a claim as some Frontier Labs are making, but a little humility goes a long way in winning over users. And Hark’s goal is not to create an app, but an operating system for the AI computers of the future.
Hark Pro is a full-screen experience with a homepage of sorts, a central chat dialog, a feed that prompts users for actions they need to take, and visualizations the company calls “panels” that provide mini-dashboards of things of interest. The background is a custom image adjusted to the weather and time of day where you are.
Like any other AI assistant, users configure it to access their digital lives, including email, calendars, hard drives, credit cards, and more. It can then not only answer traditional chatbot questions but also take on digital tasks.
Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple staffer who leads design at Hark, demoed the product for me. I proactively asked questions about expenses that needed to be approved, emails that needed to be answered, meetings with this reporter, and of course pointed out that I needed to book a flight for the trip and offered to make that arrangement. (“I know fugitives get the death penalty,” he admitted with a laugh.)
With these apps, this becomes a challenge. One of the more difficult things for users is to come up with useful tasks that they can actually perform. Chaudhry said he was impressed when an AI assistant recently recognized that one of his colleagues needed to renew his car registration at the California DMV and processed it through the department’s website.
One notable UX choice Hark makes is to show the user a small window of how the agent moves around the web. This is an action that most AI assistants take without showing it in the app, and is meant to build trust with the user that the agent is doing the right thing, Chaudhry said.
This is important because part of Hark’s pitch is that they are not Meta or OpenAI. “We’re not here to sell ads or steal data,” Chowdhury says. To truly take advantage of these models, users must share their entire digital lives. Beyond very real cybersecurity concerns, would users be happy with a company like Meta creating detailed profiles of their friends and family in its products?
When asked about this kind of profiling, Chaudhry replied, “We work to understand you and help you with what you need, but it’s really more like task-related. It’s really about how Hark can take something off your plate and be helpful.”
Chaudhry says what sets Hark Pro apart from its competitors is not just its efforts to be a complete computer replacement, but also his belief that it simply works better.
“Compare it to others and be critical,” he says. “It may not be faster than Muse, but it gives better results and works end-to-end rather than asking you to take over at some point.”
One unanswered question is what model is best suited for an AI personal assistant. Because Hark’s is explicitly trained to use computers, he can perform these tasks faster and more cheaply, but it is not clear how much of the Frontier LLM’s extensive knowledge and abilities he sacrifices.
This software is only half of Hark’s promise. Chaudhry made his name designing devices for Apple, and Haak has promised to release AI-native devices that support his company’s software in 2027.
They’re still cautious about what form it will take, with Chaudhry lamenting the “creep factor” in wearable cameras. “Let me tell you this: The first product we are building is something that has never existed before,” he says. We’ll have to wait and see if this is just hype and Hark comes out with some kind of retread technology rather than a truly novel product.
“Now we have AI, we have chatbots, we can type on a keyboard, which is really interesting,” Chaudhry said. “Fifty years from now, the future of computing will still be terminals.”
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