Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy

AI assistants are having their moment, with products like Muse, Instinct, and Dots all competing for the user experience that could make one a must-have. Hark, a startup founded less than a year ago by serial founder Brett Adcock, entered the race today with the wide release of Hark Pro, a free product with a paid subscription tier for heavy users.

Hark frames its mission as building a user interface for AI rather than chasing AGI or curing cancer. Its foundation is a model trained specifically for computer use — Hark Pro’s core trick is that it uses your computer for you. Rather than an app, the company’s broader goal is an operating system for the AI computers it expects people to use in the future.

The product itself is a full-screen homepage built around a central chat dialog and a feed of prompts for tasks the assistant could take on, plus mini-dashboard visualizations the company calls “panels.” As with other AI assistants, users connect it to their digital life — email, calendar, hard drive, credit cards — so it can handle tasks as well as answer chatbot-style questions. Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple staffer who leads design at Hark, demoed the product, which proactively surfaced expenses to approve, emails to answer, an upcoming meeting, and a flight it offered to book. Chowdhury said he was impressed when the assistant recognized on its own that a colleague needed to renew a car registration with the California DMV, and handled it through the agency’s website.

One deliberate UX choice is showing users a small window of the agent navigating the web — something Chowdhury says most AI assistants do without surfacing it — to build trust that the agent is doing the right thing. That transparency ties into Hark’s broader pitch against larger rivals: “we’re not here to like sell you ads and steal your data,” Chowdhury says. Asked about the risk of AI assistants building detailed profiles of users’ friends and family, he said Hark’s work is task-related rather than about building a broader profile of the user.

It remains unclear how much training a model specifically for computer use trades away the broader knowledge of a frontier LLM, even as it makes Hark faster and cheaper at the tasks it targets. The software is only half of Hark’s plan: the company intends to release an AI-native device in 2027 to pair with it, though Chowdhury has kept the device’s form under wraps, saying only that wearable cameras carry a “creep factor” he wants to avoid.

Why it matters

Hark’s privacy-focused pitch and plans for a dedicated AI-native device in 2027 put it in direct competition with well-funded rivals like Muse and Dots in the race to make AI personal assistants a daily habit.