从Muse到Instinct再到Dots，科技公司正在寻找能够使人工智能个人助理成为必备产品的用户体验。
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是一家由连续创始人布雷特·阿德科克（Brett Adcock）创立不到一年的初创公司，今天随着Hark Pro的广泛发布而加入了这一行列。用户可以免费访问该服务，并为重度用户提供订阅层。
Hark, a start-up 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.
该公司认为其使命是为人工智能构建用户界面，而不是创建AGI或治愈癌症。该基金会是一个专门针对计算机使用进行培训的模型，这就是Hark Pro所做的-它为您使用您的计算机。
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.
这可能不像一些前沿实验室提出的那样雄心勃勃，但一点点谦虚对于赢得用户大有帮助。Hark的目标不是一个应用程序，而是为我们未来的人工智能计算机创建一个操作系统。
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是一种全屏体验，具有一种主页，具有中央聊天对话框和一个提要，其中填充了您可能需要采取的操作的提示，以及公司称之为“面板”的可视化，为您感兴趣的内容提供迷你仪表板。背景是根据您所在的天气和时间量身定制的图像。
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.
与其他人工智能助手一样，用户将其配置为访问他们的数字生活-电子邮件、日历、硬盘、信用卡等。然后，它可以承担数字任务并回答经典的聊天机器人问题。
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.
曾任苹果公司员工、如今负责Hark设计工作的阿比杜尔·乔杜里向我演示了这款产品。它主动询问乔杜里需要审批的支出项目、需要回复的邮件，以及与本记者的会面安排；当然，它还提醒他需要预订出差机票，并主动提出可以代为办理。（“我知道订机票这事儿已经被很多工具搞定了，”他笑着承认道。）这恰恰点出了这类应用面临的难题：对用户而言，最难的事情之一就是想出自己能够完成的实用任务。
Abidhur Chowdhury, a former Apple staffer who leads design at Hark, demoed the product for me. It pro-actively 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.
乔杜里说，最近这款AI助手识别出他的一位同事需要在加利福尼亚州车管所办理车辆续牌手续，并直接通过该机构的网站完成了相关操作，这让他印象深刻。
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.
Hark在用户体验设计上的一个显著特色是：它会在一个小窗口中向用户展示AI助手浏览网页的过程。大多数AI助手执行此类操作时并不会在应用界面中显示出来，乔杜里表示，这样设计是为了让用户确信助手正在正确地执行任务，从而建立信任感。
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.
这一点至关重要，因为Hark的宣传重点之一就是强调自己与Meta或OpenAI不同——“我们不会向你推销广告，也不会窃取你的数据，”乔杜里说道。要想充分发挥这些AI模型的作用，用户就必须分享自己所有的数字生活信息。除了切实存在的网络安全隐患外，用户是否愿意让像Meta这样的公司利用其产品来生成自己亲友的详细画像呢？
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?
谈及此类用户画像的构建，乔杜里回应称：“我们努力去了解用户需求，以便提供切实的帮助，但这种了解主要围绕具体任务展开——核心目的就是帮用户减轻负担、解决实际问题。”据乔杜里介绍，Hark Pro区别于同类产品的优势在于它能全面替代用户的电脑操作，而且他坚信其实际使用效果也更为出色。
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.”What sets Hark Pro apart from its competitors, Chowdhury says, is its effort to fully subsitute for your computer, but also his belief that it just works better.
“请将其与其他产品进行比较，保持批判性，”他说。“它可能不会比Muse快，但它会给你带来更好的结果，而且它会端到端工作，而不是要求你在某个点接管。”一个悬而未决的问题是什么样的模型最适合人工智能私人助理。Hark ' s经过明确的计算机使用培训，这使得它在这些任务中更快、更便宜，但目前尚不清楚它在多大程度上牺牲了前沿法学硕士的更广泛知识和能力。
“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 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.
该软件只是Hark承诺的一半; Chowdhury在苹果设计设备时声名鹊起，Hark承诺在2027年发布一款人工智能原生设备来支持其软件。
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.
他们仍然对它的形式保持谨慎，乔杜里哀叹可穿戴相机的“蠕动因素”。“我会告诉你这个：我们正在开发的第一个产品是以前从未存在过的产品，”他说。我们必须拭目以待，看看这是否只是炒作，哈克推出了一些翻新技术，而不是真正新颖的产品。
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.
乔杜里说：“现在有了人工智能，有了聊天机器人，还用键盘输入东西，这对我来说太搞笑了。”“五十年过去了，计算的未来仍然是一个终端。”
“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.”