Robert Weideman, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Nuance Enterprise, notes that, 'When you think of conversational AI, you need to think of a person. Literally, we're trying to mimic a human agent. Consumers also expect conversations they have to flow from one channel to another – so they don't have to backtrack or repeat themselves.' Understanding emotions is key to this, and the technology is not light years away. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, a leading AI scientist, said in an interview with Wired that a machine understands that kind of complex natural language, it becomes, in effect, conscious, and said that he believes this moment to be in just 2029, when machines will have full'emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion. That's actually the most complex thing we do.