MAY 2019. DISCOVER 61recalls that early on in its development, he
didn’t see the point of dressing up the virtual
assistant’s utterances with wordplay and
humor. Providing the most helpful response
was all that really mattered, he reasoned. But
after Siri came out, even Cheyer had to admit
that Siri’s pseudo-humanity delighted users
more than any other single feature.
More recently, Google has found that the
Assistant apps with the highest user reten-
tion rates are the ones with strong personas.
And Amazon reports that the share of
“nonutilitarian and entertainment-related”
interactions that people have with Alexa —
when they engage with her fun side rather
than her practical functions — is more than
50 percent. Findings like these make intuitive
sense to Sarah Wulfeck, the creative director
for a conversational-computing company
called PullString. “Humans in the flesh world
don’t enjoy conversations with dry, boring
people,” she explained in a magazine inter-
view, “so why would we want that from our
artificial intelligence?”
Wulfeck is part of a new class of creative pro-
fessionals whose job is to build personalities for
AIs. Working in a field known as conversation
design, their efforts take place at the nexus of
science and art. Some have technological skills,
but most of them come from liberal arts rather
than computer science backgrounds. Their
ranks include authors, playwrights, come-
dians and actors, as well as anthropologists,
psychologists and philosophers.
IMAGINING THE ASSISTANT
At the outset of his career, Jonathan Foster
never imagined that he would wind up
designing the personality of an AI. He wanted
to make it in Hollywood but was never more
than modestly successful as a screenwriter.
When a friend invited him to join a tech start-
up focused on interactive storytelling, Foster
jumped, a career pivot that eventually led
him to Microsoft.
In 2014, Foster began building a creative
team that drafted a multipage personality
brief for Microsoft’s not-yet-released virtual
assistant. “If we imagined Cortana as a person,”
a product manager named Marcus Ash asked
the team, “who would Cortana be?”
Cortana was an assistant, of course.
Microsoft product researchers had interviewed
human executive assistants and learned that
they calibrate their demeanors to communi-
cate that while they must cheerfully serve, they
are by no means servants to be disrespected
or harassed. So in the personality brief, Foster
and his team called for a balance of personal
warmth and professional detachment. Cortana
is “witty, caring, charming, intelligent,” the
team decided, Ash says. As a professional
assistant, though, she is not overly informal
and instead projects efficiency. “It is not her
first turn around the block,” Ash says. “She has
been an assistant for a long time and has the
confidence of ‘I’m great at my job.’ ”
Real people aren’t exclusively defined
by their professions, and the creative team
decided that the same would be true for
Cortana. So who was she outside of work?
One possible backstory was already available:
In Microsoft’s Halo video game franchise,
Cortana is a shimmering blue AI who assists
the game’s protagonist, Master Chief John-117,
as he wages interstellar war. The actress who
supplied the voice for the video game Cortana,
Jen Taylor, was even going to do the same for
the assistant Cortana.
Microsoft, though, decided that while the
assistant Cortana would be loosely inspired
by the video game character, she should for
the most part be a new entity. The video
game Cortana zips around the cosmos in
skimpy space garb, a sexualized presenta-
tion that, while appealing to male teenage“Humans in the
flesh world
don’t enjoy
conversations
with dry, boring
people, so why
would we want
that from our
artificial
intelligence?”