Three faces, three jobs: what Notion, Apple and ChatGPT get right about character

Notion AI Assistant

The face turns interface state into performance.

Notion’s character is deliberately minimal: eyes, brows and a nose drawn in Roman Muradov’s visual language. BUCK’s production team began with cel animation, then rebuilt the performances in Rive so expressions could blend and respond to user actions in real time.

That technical choice gives the character a product job. Thinking, success and error states stop being generic spinners or alerts and become small performances. The face stays alert without demanding attention, making system feedback feel more legible and less mechanical.

Notion has since expanded its Agent into a teammate that can create and edit pages and databases, use workspace context and be personalised with a name and accessories. The character is therefore not just campaign decoration; it sits at the threshold of the working product.

Apple’s Little Finder Guy

The mascot turns a familiar symbol into a campaign participant.

Apple’s character began in the MacBook Neo campaign as a small, tactile personification of the Finder icon. ‘Little Finder Guy’ is the name audiences gave it, rather than an official product name. The character moved from brief appearances into a run of short-form videos, a WWDC pin and a wave of fan-made objects and images.

The important correction is that available sources establish a campaign mascot, not the face of an Apple AI assistant. Its job is cultural rather than conversational: make Mac features easy to watch, turn a product launch into a recurring story and invite the audience to play with a familiar brand asset.

That distinction strengthens the example. A character does not need to answer questions to make technology feel more human. Sometimes its role is to give people a recognisable protagonist for learning, sharing and remembering.

ChatGPT’s Codey

The companion makes invisible work easier to follow.

Codey appears in OpenAI’s official documentation as one of ChatGPT’s optional animated pets. In the desktop app, a pet can float above other windows and show whether work is running, needs input, is ready or has become blocked.

OpenAI is explicit that choosing a pet changes appearance, not how ChatGPT completes tasks. That boundary is good character design. Codey does not pretend to make the model smarter; it gives ongoing work a visible, ambient presence and a simple route back to the task that needs attention.

The system can also support custom pets and reduced-motion still frames. In other words, the character is treated as an interface layer with accessibility and personalisation constraints—not merely an illustration placed beside the interface.

The comparison

A face becomes valuable when it owns a repeatable moment.

Notion owns the moment when the system changes state. Apple owns the moment when a feature becomes a story. Codey owns the moment when background work needs to be noticed. Each character is memorable because its behaviour is attached to a recurring user or brand need.

For organisations exploring a Brandbot, that suggests a better first workshop question than ‘What should it look like?’ Start with the moment it should own and the responsibility it should carry. The visual language can then make that role distinctive.

• Give every expression a communication job
• Separate product capability from character personality
• Build a behaviour system, not a folder of poses
• Keep claims honest about what the character can and cannot do
• Design for every surface where the role needs to stay recognisable