TIME October 23, 2017
“It was trick or treat, and one response
was ‘smell my feet.’ People thumbed-
down the heck out of that.”
Germick has spent the afternoon
bouncing between brainstorming meet-
ings like this one, in which Googlers de-
bate life’s big questions, like whether the
sound of a bubbling cauldron or distant
howling is spookier. All of which is part of
his job as principal personality designer
for Google Assistant, the company’s
voice-activated helper found on a wide
range of smartphones and its Home smart
speaker, which first went on sale last fall.
It’s August, but Germick’s team is
grappling with what users might ask
Google on Halloween and why. Will peo-
ple turn to Assistant for costume ideas?
Or will they want to hear a seasonally
appropriate joke? The key to answering
these kinds of questions, Assistant’s cre-
ators maintain, is not to think of Google
as most of us have come to—a dispas-
sionate dispenser of information—but
as a dynamic character. “At the very sim-
plest level,” says Lilian Rincon, director of
product management for Assistant, “it’s,
Can I just talk to Google like I’m talking
to you right now?”
This is harder than it sounds. And
over the past few years, developing voice-
enabled gadgets has become one of Sili-
con Valley’s most hotly contested tech-
nology races. Assistant is available on
phones from the likes of Samsung and LG
that run the Android operating system.
Amazon offers its take, Alexa, on its pop-
ular Echo speakers. Apple has built Siri
into a plethora of iDevices. And Microsoft
is putting its Cortana helper in everything
from laptops to thermostats.
With so many companies rushing to
make such a wide variety of devices ca-
digits, but it consumed huge amounts of
power and couldn’t understand voices
it wasn’t trained to. In 1990, Dragon
Systems unveiled Dictate, software that
had a vocabulary of 30,000 terms but
required the speaker to pause awkwardly
between each word. And in 1997 the
field got its poster child for what can go
wrong. That year Microsoft introduced
Clippy, a cartoon paper clip intended to
anticipate Office users’ needs and answer
questions. But in practice, Clippy was a
worse bumbler than C-3PO, popping up
inconveniently more than it ever helped.
(It didn’t talk, thank God.) The feature
became a punch line and was retired
ignominiously in 2007.
It wasn’t until six years ago that the
noble idea behind Clippy—predicting
what information you might need next,
offering the right tips at the right mo-
ment, this time packaged in a friendly
voice—came to fruition in Apple’s Siri.
She could understand questions in con-
text and apply a level of intelligence be-
fore answering out loud. Plus, she was
funny. Before long, every one of Apple’s
competitors was working on similar
technology.
This hit-or-miss history isn’t lost on
the Googlers now working on Assistant.
Germick, who has dressed up as Clippy
for Halloween, argues that future assis-
tants have to be more than just question-
and-answer machines. After all, Google
search already does that pretty well. “We
want you to be able to connect with this
character,” he says. “Part of that is ac-
knowledging the human experience and
human needs. Not just information, but
also how we relate to people.”
Making that character seem plausible
falls to Google’s personality team, which
has been working on turning Assistant
into a digital helper that seems human
without pretending to be one. (That’s part
of the reason, by the way, that Google’s
version doesn’t have a human-ish name
like Siri or Alexa.) Coats, whose title is
character lead for personality, draws on
years of experience developing fictional
characters. She spent five years at Pixar
Animation Studios working on films such
asMonsters University, Brave andInside
Out. “It takes a lot of thinking about what
are the other tools besides facial expres-
sions that can be used to make emotional
connections,” she says.Deep inside the Googleplex, a small group of
writers is huddling around a whiteboard that is
plastered with ideas. These read like notes-to-self
that Jack Skellington might’ve made: “Halloween
survival kit,” “How to defeat monsters.” One in
particular stands out to Ryan Germick, a tall and
wiry 37-year-old. “People did not like ‘smell my
feet’ last year,” he says, laughing. His colleague
Emma Coats chimes in to explain:
pable of listening and talking to us, it’s
hard to quantify how quickly the tech-
nology will become mainstream. But
this year, 60.5 million Americans will
use Alexa, Assistant or another virtual
butler at least once a month, according to
research firm eMarketer. Sales of smart
speakers alone will reach $3.52 billion
globally by 2021, up nearly 400% from
2016, predict analysts at Gartner. Many
technology experts are convinced that
voice is the next major shift in how hu-
mans use machines. This will be “a com-
pletely different level of interaction,”
says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Insti-
tute for Artificial Intelligence, a research
outfit in Seattle. “This really becomes a
game changer when you can have a dia-
logue with a virtual assistant that may be
at the level of a concierge at a hotel.”
But barking orders at a computer is not
the same thing as having a conversation—
which puts Google in an unusual position.
The firm became one of the most valuable
companies in the world by building tech-
nology capable of doing what no human
conceivably could: indexing vast troves of
online information. Now it’s future may
hinge on teaching machines to perform
a task that comes naturally to most peo-
ple, but has proved to be profoundly dif-
ficult for computers: small talk. To do so,
the company has turned to a team of left-
brained creative types that Google isn’t
exactly known for hiring: fiction writers,
filmmakers, video-game designers, em-
pathy experts and comedians. If they suc-
ceed, they’ll give Google something it’s
never had before: a personality.DIGITAL ASSISTANTSare nothing new.
In 1952, Bell Labs’ Audrey computer was
capable of recognizing spoken numericCODY PICKENS FOR TIME