In Locus, Lois Tilton found the story "rather sad", and noted that the murder mystery "distract(ed)" from the theme of "humans forming attachments to artificial beings".
[1] Tangent Online considered it "interesting", and praised Bear for "subversion of the machine's role".
[2] At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paul Kincaid described it as "not a bad story (...) efficiently told, with enough detail of character and setting to reward the reader", but added that he was disappointed by what he saw as Bear's re-use of tropes first developed by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s.
[3] Communications of the ACM included it in an article on the use of science fiction to teach computer ethics, noting in particular its relevance to deontology.
[4] In 2021, Apple announced that it had won the right to produce a full-length adaptation of "Dolly", which would star Florence Pugh, and have a script by Vanessa Taylor and Drew Pearce.