From Muse, Instinct to Dots, various tech companies are seeking a user experience that would make AI personal assistants become essential products.
A startup founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock, Hark, which has been established for less than a year, has joined this competition today by officially launching Hark Pro. Users can use this service for free, while more frequent users have the option to subscribe to packages.
The company believes its mission is to build user interfaces for AI, rather than creating general artificial intelligence (AGI) or curing cancer. Its foundation is a model specifically trained for computer use, which is precisely the function of Hark Pro – to use the computer for you.
This might be less ambitious than the claims put forward by some cutting-edge laboratories, but moderate humility often wins over users more effectively. The goal of Hark is not to create an application, but rather to develop an operating system for future AI computers.
Hark Pro offers a full-screen experience with a homepage interface that features a chat dialog box in the center. Within the information stream, tips for actions that can be performed are displayed, along with visual content referred to by the company as "panels," which serve as mini-dashboards for topics of your interest. The background image is customized based on the weather and time of your location.
Like other AI assistants, users need to integrate it into their digital lives – including email, calendars, hard drives, credit cards, etc. Once integrated, it can handle both digital tasks and answer questions in a manner similar to traditional chatbots.
Abidhur Chowdhury, who is in charge of the design, used to work at Apple. He demonstrated this product to me. It will proactively ask him about reimbursements that need approval, emails that need to be replied to, a meeting with a certain journalist, and of course, it will also remind him to book a flight ticket for a trip, offering to do it for him. (“I know the topic of booking flight tickets has been mentioned countless times,” he admitted with a smile.)
This also highlights the challenges faced by such applications: one of the most difficult aspects for users is actually coming up with useful tasks that they can accomplish. Chowdhury mentioned that recently, AI's assistant identified that one of his colleagues needed to update their vehicle registration in California DMV, and they managed to do so through the agency's website, which impressed him greatly.
Hark A notable UX choice is to allow users to see how the proxy browses web pages in a small window. Most AI assistants perform this step in the background without displaying it within the application; Chowdhury says that doing so is to make users more confident that the proxy is indeed doing the right thing.
This is very important because one of the selling points of Hark is that they are neither Meta nor OpenAI — "We are not here to sell ads or steal your data," says Chowdhury. To truly leverage the potential of these models, users need to share their entire digital life. Apart from very real concerns about cybersecurity, would users be willing to allow companies like Meta to use their data to create detailed profiles of their friends and family?
When asked about this type of profiling analysis, Chowdhury said: "We are indeed doing some work to understand you and provide assistance when you need it, but it's really more about how Hark can help you reduce your burden and become useful."
Chowdhury says that the difference between Hark Pro and its competitors is that it strives to completely replace your computer, and at the same time, it also believes that it is indeed more user-friendly.
“Please compare it with other products and look at it critically,” he said. “It may not be faster than Muse, but it will give you better results, and it will complete the process end to end, rather than leaving you to take over at some point along the way.”
An unresolved question is which model is most suitable for the AI personal assistant. The model of Hark is specifically trained for use on computers, which makes it faster and less costly for these tasks, but it is not yet clear whether this comes at the cost of a broader range of knowledge and the capabilities of cutting-edge large language models.
This software has only fulfilled half of the promises made by Hark; Chowdhury was once famous for designing devices in Apple, while Hark promised to launch a AI native device in 2027 to complement its software.
They remain tight-lipped about the form factor of this device, and Chowdhury even complained about the “discomfort” caused by wearable cameras. “What I can tell you is: the first product we are working on is something unprecedented,” he said. Whether this is just hype, or whether Hark will ultimately launch some sort of skin-changing technology rather than a truly novel product, remains to be seen.
“What I find interesting is that now you have AI, you have chatbots, but you’re still typing with a keyboard,” Chowdhury said. “Fifty years later, the future of computing is still a terminal.”
