Yesterday’s Bloomberg report on Apple’s upcoming tabletop robot didn’t reveal anything new about the hardware, but plans to give it a personality could represent a huge gamble.
The starting point seems both uncontroversial and a great idea – basing the UI on the friendly Finder icon that we’ve known and loved since the welcome screen of the original Macintosh back in 1984 …
A Finder-based animated face
While Mark Gurman said Memoji-styles alternatives are being considered, animating the Finder icon really does sound perfect to me.
Apple is planning to put Siri at the center of the device operating system and give it a visual personality to make it feel lifelike […] Apple has tested making Siri look like an animated version of the Finder logo, the iconic smiley face representing the Mac’s file management system.
It would be a great compromise between the abstract and now dated Siri animation on the one hand, and a photorealistic human face on the other. The former seems too boring for a robot-style device, while the latter seems a little cringey.
A virtual companion
But another aspect of Apple’s reported plans seems to me significantly riskier. The report described it as attempting to be a “virtual companion,” and suggests that it may be a far from passive one.
A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion, targeted for 2027, is the centerpiece of the AI strategy, according to people with knowledge of the matter […] Like a human head, it can turn toward a person […] and even seek to draw the attention of someone not facing it […] The hallmark of the device is an entirely new version of the Siri voice assistant that can inject itself into conversations between multiple people. It will be able to engage with users throughout the day and more easily recall information. The idea is for the device to act like a person in a room. It could interrupt a conversation between friends about dinner plans, say, and suggest nearby restaurants or relevant recipes.
That sounds, uh, how do I put this? Oh yes: terrible.
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