Machines may be smart, but they make pretty dull companions. Google knows this, and as it builds out its recently announced Google Assistant personal assistant technology—which, like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, will answer questions and follow commands like “turn on the lights”—the company is eager to make artificial intelligence more personable. How? By throwing some artists at the problem, naturally.

Ryan Germick, who heads the Google Doodle team in Mountain View, is now working on adding a human touch to Google Assistant, along with Emma Coats, a freelance artist best known for her stint as a story artist at Pixar and the author of a viral list of 22 rules of storytelling. In a session at the Moogfest music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, this weekend, Germick and Coats talked about the process of making A.I. feel friendlier.

Google Assistant is a new take on the artificially intelligent “personal assistant” concept that will be built into Google products like the forthcoming Google Home speaker. Like Siri and Alexa, Google Assistant will take the form of a conversational interface, rather than any sort of humanoid-looking robot–at least for now. To make these human-to-machine exchanges more enjoyable, Google is tapping creatives like Germick and Coats to inject some humor and storytelling smarts into the conversations.

Emma Coats and Ryan Germick discuss the process of crafting an artificial personality for Google Assistant at Moogfest in North Carolina.

“Because it’s out in the wild and people can say anything to it, we have to create the most well-rounded character that we ever have tried,” Coats says. “One of the things that we’re working on is how to make it relatable. How does the character think of itself in a way that you can relate to? What is its childhood?”

It’s no slip of the tongue that Coats refers to Google Assistant as “a character.” Her experience working on Pixar films like Brave lends itself perfectly to the less-robotic type of A.I. that Google is hoping to build into its products in the future.