Question: Will Google release a chatbot in 2016?
Author, inventor, and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil is known as a public advocate for [the Singularity](http://www.singularity.com/), predicting that within decades, artificial intelligence will surpass that of human beings. In 2012, Kurzweil was [hired as Google’s Director of Engineering](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/14/google-hires-famed-futurist-ray-kurzweil), with a focus on projects involving machine learning and natural language processing.

At a May 2016 conference held by [Singularity University](http://singularityu.org/), Kurzweil announced that his Google team is working on a chatbot to be released later this year. [One of the bots will be named Danielle](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11801108/ray-kurzweil-building-chatbot-for-google), after the titular character of Kurzweil’s [yet-to-be-released novel](https://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-ray-kurzweil). Kurzweil described a chatbot that, given substantial writing samples from a unique user, could be personalized to adopt the writer’s [“style, personality, and ideas”](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11801108/ray-kurzweil-building-chatbot-for-google). The anticipated bots will be able to hold conversations that are [“interesting,” though not yet near the sophistication of human-to-human communication](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/05/31/google-chat-bot-coming-year-renowned-inventor-says/).

The story broke via a video from the conference posted on technology and culture website [theverge.com](http://www.theverge.com/). The video has since been removed due to copyright restrictions by Singularity University; no official announcement of Kurzweil's project has been made by Google.

Kurzweil’s announcement comes at a time of chatbot development among tech giants. The CEO of Microsoft recently declared that chatbots will [revolutionize computing](http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/11/microsoft-ceo-chatbots-will-fundamentally-revolutionize-computing/), although Microsoft suffered an embarrassing setback in March when its Twitter chatbot had to be disabled in less than a day [after learning hate speech from users](http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist). Facebook’s Messenger app features [over 11,000 chatbots for users to converse with](http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/30/facebook-messenger-now-has-11000-chatbots-for-you-to-try/). Earlier this year, Google itself released a [new smart messaging app, Allo](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/05/chat-smarter-with-allo.html), that learns a user’s texting style in order to provide intelligent suggestions for conversations with other humans.
Created: 2016-07-30
Resolved: 2017-01-01
Answer: no