Google Wants To Create A Backstory For Its AI Assistant

At Google I/O recently, the company took the wraps off Google Assistant, a new AI-powered assistant feature that would be making its way into products like Google Home and their new Allo messaging app. So far Google Assistant looks and sounds promising, and Google is hoping to enhance it further by giving it a backstory.

According to a report from Fast Company, it has been revealed that Google has tasked Ryan Germick (who leads the Google Doodle team) and Emma Coats (a freelance artist who has worked at Pixar) to create a backstory for their assistant. The idea is that by giving the assistant a backstory, it would make interacting with the AI more enjoyable.

Since Google designed the new assistant to be more conversational, injecting some stories and a bit of humor would make it feel less like a robot, plus it would also encourage users to interact with it more. Coats likens this to how we tend to naturally become friends with people we spend a lot of time with.

“You become friends with people because you spend a lot of time with them. There have been studies that show that it doesn’t necessarily matter if you instantly click with someone. One thing we do is to make the character as entertaining as we possibly can, so that you want to spend time with it.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), Google