The race to create the definitive AI personal assistant is heating up, with companies like Muse, Instinct, and Dots all vying for the user experience that will make such a product indispensable. Today, a startup called Hark—founded less than a year ago by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock—is entering the fray with the broad release of Hark Pro. The service is available for free, with a subscription option for power users. Hark's stated mission is to build a user interface for AI, rather than pursuing artificial general intelligence or medical breakthroughs. At its core is a model trained specifically for computer use, and that's precisely what Hark Pro does: it operates your computer on your behalf. While that may sound less grandiose than the ambitions of some frontier labs, a bit of modesty can go a long way in winning users over. Instead of an app, Hark aims to create an operating system for the AI-driven computers of tomorrow.

Hark Pro offers a full-screen experience centered around a homepage, which includes a main chat dialog and a feed filled with action prompts and visualizations the company calls "panels"—mini-dashboards for topics you care about. The background is custom imagery that adapts to your local weather and time. Like other AI assistants, users grant it access to their digital life—email, calendar, hard drive, credit cards, and more. From there, it can handle digital tasks as well as answer typical chatbot queries. Abidhur Chowdhury, a former Apple employee who leads design at Hark, gave me a demo. The assistant proactively asked him about expenses awaiting approval, emails needing responses, a meeting with this reporter, and even pointed out that he needed to book a flight for a trip, offering to handle it. ("I know the flight thing is put to death," he admits, grinning.)

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That highlights a key challenge with these apps: one of the hardest things for users is figuring out useful tasks the AI can actually accomplish. Chowdhury recalls being impressed when the assistant recently noticed a colleague needed to renew their car registration at the California DMV and completed it through the agency's website. One notable UX decision Hark makes is displaying the agent's web navigation in a small window—something most AI assistants do behind the scenes. Chowdhury says this is meant to build trust that the agent is doing the right thing. That matters because part of Hark's pitch is that they aren't Meta or OpenAI—"we're not here to like sell you ads and steal your data," Chowdhury says. To truly harness these models, users will need to share their entire digital lives. Beyond legitimate cybersecurity concerns, will users be comfortable with a company like Meta having its products build detailed profiles of their friends and family? When asked about such profiling, Chowdhury says that "we are doing work to understand you, and be helpful for what you need, but it's really like task related—it's really about how Hark can help take something off your plate and be useful."

What distinguishes Hark Pro from its rivals, Chowdhury says, is its effort to fully replace your computer, along with his conviction that it simply performs better. "Please compare it to the others, be critical," he says. "It might not be faster than Muse, but it will give you a better result, and it will work end-to-end instead of asking you to take over at a point."

One unresolved question is which type of model best suits an AI personal assistant. Hark's model is explicitly trained for computer use, making it faster and cheaper at those tasks, but it's unclear how much broader knowledge and capability of a frontier LLM it sacrifices. This software is only half of Hark's promise; Chowdhury made his name designing devices at Apple, and Hark plans to release an AI-native device to support its software in 2027. They remain tight-lipped about its form, with Chowdhury lamenting the "creep factor" of wearable cameras. "I will give you this: the first product that we're building is a product that's never ever existed before," he says. Only time will tell whether this is mere hype or whether Hark delivers genuinely novel technology rather than a retread. "It's so hilarious to me that you have AI now, you have a chatbot, and you type stuff in with a keyboard," Chowdhury says. "Fifty years later and the future of computing is still a terminal."