My theory is that you don’t inherently trust what you can’t see. Or rather, it’s more difficult to trust things you can’t see. Take AI for example, it literally took ChatGPT to become a sycophant for people to put their trust in it. But Clippy, as useless as it was, garnered a level of fondness… because you could see it, you were aware of its presence. Siri is currently facing this exact problem, it lacks the emotional warmth of ChatGPT, and the physical presence of a Clippy. That, in part, is a major reason why Siri hasn’t ‘stuck’, but Ben Geskin’s reimagination of Apple’s voice assistant may solve one of those problems.
For current Vision Pro users, Siri exists as a glass orb with a glowing waveform inside it (sort of like Siri on your phones and tablets). However, given Apple’s push for making Siri smarter (using AI), Geskin decided the voice assistant needed a new avatar – something that felt warm, familiar, trustworthy. Geskin’s Siri 2.0 features a friendly face, borrowed from the MacOS Finder icon, and put on a colorful orb that sort of feels like an abstracted gradiented version of the Apple Intelligence colors. While the Finder icon has always existed as just a static face, it now comes to life with this new avatar of Siri, looking at you, answering your questions, and responding with the emotional connect of an AI assistant, and the adorable face that’s as warm as Clippy (but probably a tad more useful!)
Designer:
Geskin shared his concept on Threads, garnering a lot of responses from people who compared it to Clippy, and some who said it reminded them of Miss Minutes from the TV series Loki. The latter is a stellar example of how a ‘face’ or a ‘presence’ can really humanize something that isn’t inherently human… to the point that it feels dystopian. However, with Siri 2.0, this merely gives Apple’s popular voice assistant a face to match.
Now, instead of interacting with a bunch of glowing soundwaves, you have a personality to direct your queries to. This particular variant only exists in Vision Pro (it really does make the most sense in the spatial realm), although I don’t see why the Finder ‘face’ couldn’t just become the avatar for Apple Intelligence. The colors inside could move to create dynamism (they could rotate while the AI is thinking), and god forbid if the thing crashes, all it needs to do is become Apple’s beach ball!
I really don’t subscribe to the idea of ‘humanizing’ AI, but I’d like to at least know what I’m talking to. Currently, Siri exists either as an ominous voice inside my AirPods, or as a glow around my iPhone screen. For all its faults, I do still think Siri deserves a more concrete presence, and Geskin’s reimagination of the popular voice assistant really has my heart! After all, if it has a name, it should have a face too, right?!
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