Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy

From Muse to Instinct to Dots, tech firms are hunting for the user experience that will make an AI personal assistant a must-have product.

Hark, a startup founded less than a year ago by serial founder Brett Adcock is throwing its hat in the ring today with the wide release of Hark Pro. Users can access the service for free, with a subscription tier for heavy users.

The company sees its mission as building a user interface 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—it uses your computer for you.

That’s perhaps a less ambitious claim than some frontier labs are making, but a little humility goes a long way in winning over users. And rather than an app, Hark’s goal is to create an operating system for the AI computers of our future.

Hark Pro is a full-screen experience with a kind of homepage, featuring a central chat dialog and a feed populated by prompts for actions you might need it to take and visualizations the company calls “panels” that offer mini-dashboards for things you’re interested in. The background is a piece of custom imagery tailored to the weather and time where you are.

Like other AI assistants, users configure it to access their digital life — email, calendar, hard drive, credit cards, etc. Then, it can take on digital tasks as well as fielding classic chatbot questions.