Google hired writers from Pixar and The Onion to make Assistant more personable

wall-e pixar

(A scene from Pixar's "Wall-E."Disney / Pixar)

Google wants its Assistant to be more than just an order-taking robot — so it hired some clever writers from outside the company to help make it happen.

A new story from the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims details the advancements of different artificial intelligence devices like Amazon Echo and Google's rival product Home, and how they're comforting for those who live alone thanks to how personable the AI's have become.

For Google, that friendly personality is thanks to a team of writers from Pixar and The Onion who helped make the Assistant — which powers Google's Home device — sound more like a human and less like a robot, according to the Journal. Google's eventual goal is to help users build an emotional connection with the Assistant, the Journal reports.

Google unveiled its Assistant-enabled Home device last week, a direct competitor to other AI-powered hardware devices like Amazon's Echo. The Assistant itself is similar to Alexa, which powers the Echo: It has voice-recognition software, natural language recognition, and it gets smarter over time.

You can ask the Assistant to tell you a joke, give you the weather or set a timer, but you can also ask it to do things like remember your favorite sports team or the city you live in. Much like other AI — like Alexa or Apple's Siri — the Assistant can be equal parts sweet and sassy, which is what helps it seem more relatable and more human. The Assistant lives inside Google Home, but it's also enabled in Google's new messaging app, Allo and its new Pixel smartphone.

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