Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy

Hark, a startup founded less than a year ago by serial founder Brett Adcock, has released Hark Pro widely. Users can access the service for free, with a subscription tier for heavy users. The company describes its mission as building a user interface for AI, not creating AGI or curing cancer, and says the foundation is a model trained specifically for computer use.

Hark Pro is a full-screen experience with a homepage featuring a central chat dialog and a feed of suggested actions, plus visualizations the company calls "panels" that offer mini-dashboards. The background is custom imagery tailored to the user's local weather and time. Users configure it to access their digital life, including email, calendar, hard drive and credit cards, after which it can take on digital tasks as well as answer chatbot questions.

Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple staffer who leads design at Hark, demoed the product for the reporter. It proactively raised expenses to approve, emails to answer and a meeting, and offered to book a flight. Chowdhury said the assistant recently recognized a colleague needed to renew their car registration at the California DMV and handled it through the agency's website. Hark shows the user how the agent navigates the web in a small window, which Chowdhury said is intended to build trust.

Chowdhury said Hark is not Meta or OpenAI, saying "we're not here to like sell you ads and steal your data," and that its work to understand users is task-related. He said the product's difference is its effort to fully substitute for a computer, and that it may not be faster than Muse but will deliver a better end-to-end result. Hark has promised to release an AI-native device in 2027 and is still cagey about its form. The first product, Chowdhury said, is something that has never existed before.