Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy
Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy
Hark 发布了一款主打隐私保护的 AI 个人助理
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.
从 Muse 到 Instinct 再到 Dots，科技公司一直在寻找能让 AI 个人助理成为必备产品的用户体验。Hark 是一家由连续创业者 Brett Adcock 在不到一年前创立的初创公司，今日正式发布 Hark Pro，加入这场竞争。用户可以免费使用该服务，重度用户则可选择订阅付费版本。
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.
该公司认为其使命是为 AI 构建用户界面，而不是创造通用人工智能（AGI）或攻克癌症。其基础是一个专门针对计算机操作训练的模型，这正是 Hark Pro 的核心功能——它能替你操作电脑。这或许比一些前沿实验室的愿景要“务实”得多，但这种谦逊的态度在赢得用户方面大有裨益。Hark 的目标不是开发一个应用程序，而是为未来的 AI 计算机打造一个操作系统。
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.
Hark Pro 提供全屏体验，拥有类似主页的界面，中心是一个聊天对话框，信息流中会根据你可能需要的操作提供提示，并配有公司称为“面板”（panels）的可视化组件，为用户感兴趣的内容提供迷你仪表盘。背景是根据用户所在地的天气和时间定制的图像。与其他 AI 助理一样，用户可以配置它来访问自己的数字生活——包括电子邮件、日历、硬盘、信用卡等。随后，它既能处理数字任务，也能回答传统的聊天机器人问题。
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.
曾在苹果公司工作、现负责 Hark 设计工作的 Abidur Chowdhury 为我演示了该产品。它主动询问他需要审批的费用、需要回复的邮件、与记者的会议，当然，还提醒他需要预订行程机票并主动提出代劳。（“我知道机票预订这个功能已经被说烂了，”他笑着承认。）这确实触及了此类应用面临的挑战：对用户而言，最难的事情之一其实是想出这些 AI 真正能胜任的实用任务。
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 that the agent is doing the right thing.
Chowdhury 表示，令他印象深刻的是，该 AI 助理最近识别出他的一位同事需要在加州车管所（DMV）更新车辆登记，并直接通过该机构的网站完成了办理。Hark 的一个显著 UX（用户体验）选择是，在一个小窗口中向用户展示代理是如何浏览网页的。大多数 AI 助理在执行此操作时不会在应用中显示过程，Chowdhury 称这样做是为了建立用户信任，让用户确信代理正在执行正确的操作。
That matters because part of Hark’s pitch is that they are not Meta or OpenAI — “we’re not here to like sell you ads and steal your data,” Chowdhury says. To truly leverage these models, users will need to share their entire digital lives. Beyond very real cybersecurity concerns, will users be comfortable with a company like Meta having its products create detailed profiles of their friends and family? Asked about that kind of 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.”
这一点至关重要，因为 Hark 的卖点之一就是他们不是 Meta 或 OpenAI——“我们不是来向你兜售广告或窃取你的数据的，”Chowdhury 说道。要真正利用这些模型，用户需要共享他们的整个数字生活。除了现实的网络安全担忧外，用户是否愿意让像 Meta 这样的公司通过其产品为自己的亲友建立详细的档案？在被问及此类画像分析时，Chowdhury 表示：“我们确实在努力了解你，以便为你提供帮助，但这更多是与任务相关的——重点在于 Hark 如何帮你分担工作并发挥作用。”
What sets Hark Pro apart from its competitors, Chowdhury says, is its effort to fully substitute for your computer, but also his belief that it just works 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.”
Chowdhury 认为，Hark Pro 与竞争对手的区别在于它致力于完全替代你的电脑，同时也因为他坚信它的表现更好。“请把它和其他产品对比，保持批判性，”他说。“它可能没有 Muse 快，但它会给你更好的结果，并且它能端到端地完成任务，而不是在某个环节要求你接手。”
One open question is what kind of model best suits the AI personal assistant. Hark’s is explicitly trained for computer use, which makes it faster and cheaper at those tasks, but it’s not clear how much it is trading away the broader knowledge and capability of a frontier LLM. This software is only half the promise of Hark; Chowdhury made his name designing devices at Apple and Hark promises to release an AI-native device to support its software in 2027.
一个悬而未决的问题是，什么样的模型最适合 AI 个人助理。Hark 的模型是专门为计算机操作训练的，这使其在处理这些任务时更快、成本更低，但尚不清楚它在多大程度上牺牲了前沿大语言模型（LLM）更广泛的知识和能力。这款软件只是 Hark 愿景的一半；Chowdhury 曾在苹果公司因设计设备而闻名，Hark 承诺在 2027 年发布一款支持其软件的 AI 原生设备。
They’re still cagey about the form it will take, with Chowdhury bemoaning 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. We’ll have to wait and see if this is mere hype and Hark puts out some retread tech instead of a truly novel product. “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.”
他们对该设备的形式仍守口如瓶，Chowdhury 对可穿戴摄像头的“令人毛骨悚然的因素”表示担忧。“我可以告诉你一点：我们正在打造的第一款产品是前所未有的，”他说。我们只能拭目以待，看看这是否仅仅是炒作，或者 Hark 是否会推出一些陈旧技术的翻版，而不是真正创新的产品。“我觉得很可笑，现在有了 AI，有了聊天机器人，你却还要用键盘输入东西，”Chowdhury 说。“五十年过去了，计算的未来竟然还是一个终端。”