Exclusive: Inside Google Assistant's personality team

Voice assistants are like sleep, magnets, or Advil: We're happy to have them, even if we don't really get how they work. You can ask a question of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant, and boom: it speaks a factual answer. More impressively still, you can kid around with your voice assistant, and it'll kid right back, tossing back your goofball question ("What's the meaning of life?") with a goofball answer ("All signs indicate chocolate"). But how can an artificially intelligent being have humor, sass, and tact? How can a blob of code have a personality? Behind the scenes, human teams at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google write every joke, program every trivia game, hammer out subroutines to handle everything you might say.