Hark releases Hark Pro AI personal assistant with privacy pitch

Hark says its mission is to build a user interface for AI, not to create AGI or cure cancer. The foundation of Hark Pro is a model trained specifically for computer use, and the product uses a user's computer on their behalf. The company describes the goal as an operating system for future AI computers, not merely an app.

Hark Pro is a full-screen experience with a homepage, a central chat dialog and a feed populated by prompts for actions and visualizations the company calls panels, which serve as mini-dashboards. The background is custom imagery based on the user's weather and time. As with other AI assistants, users configure access to email, calendar, hard drive, credit cards and other parts of their digital lives. It can then perform digital tasks and answer conventional chatbot questions.

Abidhur Chowdhury, a former Apple employee who leads design at Hark, demonstrated the product for TechCrunch AI. During the demo, Hark Pro asked him about expenses awaiting approval, emails needing responses and a meeting with the reporter. It also said he needed to book a flight and offered to handle it. Chowdhury said the assistant recently recognized that a colleague needed to renew a car registration at the California DMV and completed the task through the agency's website.

One design choice is that Hark shows users how the agent navigates the web in a small window, while most AI assistants perform such actions without surfacing them in the app. Chowdhury said the feature is intended to build trust that the agent is doing the right thing.

Hark's pitch includes a privacy contrast with larger platforms. Chowdhury said Hark is not Meta or OpenAI and that "we're not here to like sell you ads and steal your data," according to TechCrunch AI. He acknowledged that using such models requires users to share their entire digital lives. The reliance on broad access to personal data raises cybersecurity concerns, and questions remain about whether users would be comfortable with a company such as Meta creating detailed profiles of their friends and family. Asked about profiling, Chowdhury said Hark is "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."

Chowdhury said Hark Pro differs from competitors in its effort to fully substitute for a user's computer and in his view that it works better. "Please compare it to the others, be critical," he told TechCrunch AI. "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."

An open question is which model architecture best suits an AI personal assistant. Hark's model is explicitly trained for computer use, making it faster and cheaper for those tasks, but it is not clear how much broader knowledge and capability of a frontier large language model the company gives up.

Software is only half of Hark's stated ambition. Chowdhury previously designed devices at Apple, and Hark has promised to release an AI-native device to support its software in 2027. The company remains cagey about its form, and Chowdhury criticized 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 said. Whether that proves hype or a genuinely novel product is not yet clear.

Chowdhury also questioned current computing interfaces. "It's so hilarious to me that you have AI now, you have a chatbot, and you type stuff in with a keyboard," he said. "Fifty years later and the future of computing is still a terminal."