The future, apparently, will be ruled by imaginary friends — “chat bots” that lack physical form but can do everything from ordering the perfect pair of shoes to comforting us in times of trial. We will interact with these bots via voice and by text, and their artificial intelligence (AI) and comprehensive knowledge about everything we do will give them the power to know us better than we know ourselves.
Who better to develop the best imaginary friend than Google, world leader in AI and keeper of a bottomless wealth of information about each of us? If you want a chat bot that can speak to your soul while fulfilling your needs before you know you have them, Google is the tech behemoth for you.
And the company this year will let a chat bot loose upon the world, according to famed inventor and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil. The bot will be named “Danielle,” Kurzweil said at a conference last week, according to a video clip posted by tech website The Verge.
Kurzweil, who invented a scanning technology that revolutionized digitization of printed materials, isn’t promising a perfect bot tomorrow. Danielle, and other bots Google plans to release soon, will be able to have conversations, but not at a human-to-human level yet, he said. “These conversations will be interesting,” Kurzweil said. “Meaningful is in the eye of the beholder.”
Should Danielle be perfect in every other way besides being you, Google will cover that with an additional bot option, Kurzweil said. Because artificial intelligence is based on the data fed into the software, bots can be custom-made. “You can actually create one with your own personality if you feed in your blog, that expresses your style and personality and ideas, and (the bot) will adopt those,” Kurzweil said.
Even the you-bot won’t be ready for fully human-quality chatting till 2029 when bots reach our level, Kurzweil said. “They’ll be indistinguishable from human intelligence,” he said.
Photo: Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil (Helene DeLillo)
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