The search giant Google has a fresh development in artificial intelligence that could one day lead to a wise personal assistant.

The research is part of a larger effort within Google to develop conversational AI tools.

Deep Mind, a Google research group in London, has created an AI capable of learning how to play video games without instructions. Geoff Hinton, a distinguished researcher at Google, is working on what’s known as thought vectors, which distill the meaning of a sentence so they can be compared to other sentences or images.

The vector endeavor may also tie into a nascent project named Descartes that Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, is working on. “We’re creating dialog agents in Descartes,” Kurzweil says in a video presentation obtained by Bloomberg. “One of the issues we’re grappling with is that these bots you interact with need to have their own motivations and goals, and we need to figure out what those are.”

Microsoft, the University of Montreal and the Georgia Institute of Technology are conducting research outlining a system based on a similar approach.

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Bloomberg | Google invents an AI system that plays video games on its own