Google Is Trying to Get an Edge in the Assistant Wars by Hiring Comedy Writers

Ask Siri or Amazon Alexa to tell you a joke, and you'll probably get something a 10-year-old would scrunch her nose at. Google wants to change that. The company unveiled Google Home, its Amazon Echo-like home assistant, last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google hired writers from places like Pixar and the Onion to help spice up the Home's dialogue and give its AI more personality. Apparently there's more work to be done: As Tech Crunch points out, Google currently has a job listing for someone with "experience writing dialogue for plays/screenplays, fiction/interactive fiction, and/or comedy/entertainment." Personality can be hard to nail down in AI.