Digital assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now already are widely used, especially on mobile devices despite still being early stage technology…

The level of artificial intelligence in these examples is remarkable, but is far behind human levels. Soon Viv Labs be releasing what promises to be the next generation of digital assistant.

One of the first prognosticators of such AI, Ray Kurzweil has himself been working on the next generation of such assistants as a director of engineering at Google. Recently the inventor, author and futurist revealed that he and his team have been working with Google to create chatbots. These are said to be advanced bots with which you can have “interesting conversations”.

“If you think you can have a meaningful conversation with a human, you’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation with an AI in 2029. But you’ll be able to have interesting conversations before that,” said Kurzweil at the Exponential Manufacturing conference this year, and sticking to his familiar prediction timelines.

Kurzweil included in his telepresence talk that one of the chatbots would be based off one of his book’s characters – Danielle. But these chatbots won’t be limited to specific personalities. He said you will be able to create your own AI bots by feeding them significant amounts of text, like a blog.

Kurzweil also stated that, in principle, anyone can create a chatbot. You have to feed it with enough input in the form of text, so that it has enough answers to create an illusion of natural conversation. If you feed the chatbot with the texts that you wrote yourself, then it assumes its own personality and your own style.

He added: “The pace of change is faster and faster. An idea that works this year won’t necessarily work next year. When I started in technology a generation of technology was about 20 years; now it’s two years. It’s very quick and you can’t rest on your laurels.”
Kurzweil says they’re planning to release some of the chatbots they’ve been working on later this year.