Google's Ray Kurzweil has claimed that within 15 years we will be interacting with intelligent computers.
As the search giant's director of engineering, Kurzweil is no stranger to predicting the progress of computing technology.
Having developed everything from flatbed scanners to text-to-speech synthesizers, the artificial intelligence expert predicted back in 1990 that a computer would beat the world chess champion by 1998, a feat that was achieved in 1997 when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.
Now Kurzweil has claimed that by 2029, computers will be able to interact with us on a far more human-like level. Sophisticated voice recognition, speech synthesis and natural language processing will give rise to a whole new generation of machines capable of cracking jokes, learning from their experiences and engaging in everday conversation like a real person.
"Today, I'm pretty much at the median of what artificial intelligence (AI) experts think and the public is kind of with them," he said. "The public has seen things like Siri, where you talk to a computer. They've seen the Google self-driving cars. My views are not radical anymore."
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