Ray Kurzweil is building a chatbot for Google

Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. These days he is probably best known as a prophet of The Singularity, one of the leading voices predicting that artificial intelligence will soon surpass its human creators -- resulting in either our enslavement or immortality, depending on how things shake out. Back in 2012 he was hired at Google as a director of engineering to work on natural language recognition, and today we got another hint of what he is working on. In a video from a recent Singularity conference Kurzweil says he and his team at Google are building a chatbot, and that it will be released sometime later this year. Kurzweil was answering questions from the audience, via telepresence robot naturally.