GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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Apple’s new Siri AI is finally here, and so far, it seems like it works. I have access and have been messing around with it, and my biggest impression so far is that Siri AI is quite curt — which I mean as a compliment.
Many AI chatbots are cheery and wordy. While a more verbose and casual personality can make a chatbot seem friendlier and more fun to talk to, there are instances of users becoming extremely attached to their chatbot of choice. People have fallen in love with chatbots. When OpenAI suddenly shut down GPT-4o, users grieved its loss, and the company brought the model back for paid users. And while some companies have dialed back their AI models’ personalities or given users options for more subdued tones, I still find most AI chatbots to be too talkative and too eager to ask follow-up questions that are clearly designed to push me toward chatting more.
With Siri AI, I haven’t run into any of that; it answers the questions I ask, and that’s about it.
Out of curiosity, I spent a few minutes comparing responses between the default personalities for Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Siri AI. (Though I should note that you can’t change Siri’s personality.) Take the extremely basic prompt of “What’s going on?”:
Gemini: “Not much on my end—just hanging out in the digital ether, ready to help you out! How are things going with you? What’s on your mind today?”
ChatGPT: “I’m here. I don’t have enough context from ‘what’s going on?’ to know what you mean. Do you mean what’s happening in this chat, the news, your files/calendar/email, or something else?”
Siri AI: “I can search the web for news and other topics once you enable the necessary settings on your device.”
When I ask, “What’s today’s weather in Portland?”:
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