Hark — a company founded by serial startup founder Brett Adcock less than a year ago — announced on October 6, 2026, the general availability of its personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Hark Pro. The new assistant runs in a full-screen interface and is offered for free; a separate paid subscription is available for heavy users. The company's official website now offers downloads of Hark Pro from the App Store and Play Store as well as registration; the product is described as a "new system for getting things done".
How Hark Pro Works
Hark Pro is built on a model specifically trained to work with computers. The assistant connects to the user's digital life — email, calendar, hard drive, credit cards — and takes over tasks such as answering emails, scheduling meetings, and booking flights. It also answers ordinary chatbot-style questions.
One of the company's notable design choices: Hark shows the user in a small window how the agent moves through web pages, while most assistants run this process invisibly. According to Hark's head of design Abidur Chowdhury, who rose to fame designing devices at Apple, the solution is meant to inspire confidence that the agent is doing the right thing.
During the demo, Chowdhury showed off the assistant's proactivity: as reported by TechCrunch, the AI reminded him of expenses that needed approval, emails awaiting replies, a scheduled meeting with a journalist, and offered to book flights for a trip. In another example, the assistant detected that one employee's car registration was about to expire and renewed it through the California Department of Motor Vehicles website.
"Please, compare us with others, be critical. It may not be faster than Muse, but it will give you a better result and won't hand the work back to you halfway," Chowdhury told TechCrunch.
The Hark Pro interface consists of a central chat thread, a feed of suggested actions to take, and visualizations of mini control panels the company calls "panels". The background is decorated with a special image adapted to the weather and time at the user's location. According to the company's official website (https://hark.com/), the assistant has persistent memory and personalizes responses. The computer-use agent called "Handoff" acts on the internet through a full browser on its own secure computer, just like a user: it can build websites, conduct research, place orders, and prepare slides.
Hark's Mission and Model Choice
The company sees its mission not as creating artificial general intelligence, but as building the user interface for AI. Hark's goal is to create the operating system for future AI computers. That is why Hark Pro is designed not as an app, but as an environment intended to fully replace the computer.
An important question is which model suits such an assistant. Hark's model is trained specifically to work with computers: that makes it faster and cheaper for such tasks, but it is still unclear how much of the broad knowledge and capabilities of frontier large language models it gives up.
According to the official website, Hark also offers customizable "panels": a person describes what they want, and the AI creates mini-apps on that topic — for example, based on data from already-used services such as Strava, Spotify, or Venmo. The "Action Buttons" feature turns the assistant's suggestions into actions completed in a single click.
The Privacy Promise
Hark's main selling point is privacy. The company positions itself against giants like Meta or OpenAI:
"We are not here to sell you advertising or steal your data," Chowdhury told TechCrunch.
The catch is that fully using such assistants requires a person to share their entire digital life. According to Chowdhury, Hark works on understanding the user, but this is "task-bound" — the goal is to take the load off people's shoulders.
Hark's official website announces a protection mechanism called "Secured by hark": data is protected through end-to-end encryption. The company describes it as "a vault no human can enter", and the assistant agrees with the user before taking actions that require consent. At the same time, TechCrunch notes that cybersecurity questions remain open.
An AI Device Planned for 2027
According to Hark, software is only half the promise. The company plans to release in 2027 a device built specifically for AI that will support its software, but its form factor remains secret.
Chowdhury criticized the "creepy" side of wearable cameras and said:
"Let me put it this way: the first product we're creating is a product that has never existed before."
In his view, the future of computing has not changed: "AI has arrived, there is a chatbot, you type on a keyboard — even fifty years from now, the future of computing is still the terminal." Hark's goal, though, is to create the operating system for future AI computers.
