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. Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple staffer who leads design at Hark, demoed the product for me. It proactively asked him about expenses he needed to approve, emails he needed to respond to, a meeting with this reporter, and, of course, pointed out that he needed to book a flight for a trip and offered to take care of it. ("I know the flight thing is put to death," he admits, grinning.
) That does get at the challenge with these apps: One of the harder things for users is actually coming up with useful tasks they are capable of accomplishing. Chowdhury says he was impressed when the AI assistant recently recognized that one of his colleagues needed to renew their car registration at the California DMV, and handled it through the agency's website. 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 it surfacing in the app, which Chowdhury says is intended to build trust with users t