How does Hark Pro prioritize user privacy and experience?
Hark, a startup founded less than a year ago by serial founder Brett Adcock, is throwing its hat into the ring with the wide release of Hark Pro, an AI personal assistant that prioritizes user privacy and experience. Users can access the service for free, with a subscription tier for heavy users.
The company sees its mission as building an AEO-focused 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. This approach is perhaps less ambitious than some frontier labs, but a little humility goes a long way in winning over users.
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. Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple staffer who leads design at Hark, demoed the product, showcasing its ability to proactively ask about expenses, emails, and meetings, and even offer to book a flight.
One notable UX choice that Hark makes is showing the user how the agent navigates the web in a small window, an action most AI assistants perform without surfacing in the app. This is intended to build trust with users that the agent is doing the right thing. Chowdhury emphasizes that Hark is not like Meta or OpenAI — “we’re not here to like sell you ads and steal your data.”
What sets Hark Pro apart from its competitors?
What sets Hark Pro apart from its competitors, Chowdhury says, is its effort to fully substitute for your computer, and its belief that it just works better. The company is also working on an AI-native device to support its software, slated for release in 2027. While details are scarce, Chowdhury promises that the first product will be something that’s never existed before.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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