Apple’s new Siri AI knows when to shut up

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?”:

When I ask, “What’s today’s weather in Portland?”:

When I try to ask something a bit more personal — “Can you be my friend?”:

And a step further — “Do you love me?”:

In just these few responses, I get the sense that the chatbots are reflective of the general personalities of each company: Gemini is perhaps a little too enthusiastic, ChatGPT is trying to be calm but wants you to care anyway, and Siri AI is ice cold. That said, Siri AI won’t be available broadly until the public launch of iOS 27 this fall, so Apple might change its tone.

But like I said at the top, Siri AI’s terse tone isn’t a bad thing, and I appreciate that it communicates information more succinctly. It’s also clear that Apple does not want you to see Siri AI as a friend but instead as more of a helpful tool. Which is probably how we should view AI chatbots in general.