People find it harder to trust things they cannot see, making visible presence important for adoption of AI assistants. ChatGPT gained trust partly through conversational warmth, while Clippy garnered fondness because users could see and acknowledge its presence. Siri currently presents as a waveform orb lacking emotional warmth and physical personality, which has hindered its lasting popularity. Ben Geskin reimagined Siri as a friendly face derived from the MacOS Finder icon placed on a colorful orb, blending Apple Intelligence colors. The new avatar looks at users, answers questions, and provides an emotional connection similar to Clippy, aiming to humanize the assistant and increase trust.
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.
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,
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.
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