Designed Siri’s first interaction with another celebrity or character, helping frame Siri’s positioning from a robotic agent to an entity with relationships to the physical world.
Voice assistant’s changing persona and position in the world.For years, the Siri design team has (politely) rejected requests from both internal and external partners to collaborate with celebrities. They felt mostly gimmicky and toed around the line of ‘what is Siri?’. But when the Siri engineering team presented a new piece of software for us to try, the opportunity to collaborate with Oprah for Oprah’s Book Club came along, and noticing a changing relationship between our users and their voice assistants, we re-evaluated what this could mean for Siri moving forward.
“WHAT’S OPRAH READING”
“Well, there’s probably no one better to tell you that than Oprah herself. Here she is!
Siri has relationships and preferencesBefore this release, Siri would try to skirt around questions like “what’s your favorite color”. The idea was to keep some separation between ‘Siri’s world’ and ‘our world’. With this release, we introduce Siri as an entity that is a part of ‘our world’, with its own relationships and preferences.
FIRST EXPERIENCE
“Well, there’s probably no one better to tell you that than Oprah herself. Here she is!”
FIRST+ EXPERIENCE
“Here’s Oprah to tell you about it!”
The Siri editorial team and I identified a few key parameters for future collaborations:
