In only 15 years, robots will be smarter than the people who build them, a leading scientist believes.

Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029, robots will be able to hold conversations with people, learn from experience and understand human behavior better than even humans.

He added that machines will actually be able to flirt.

Kurzweil, who is now working with Google, is credited with such inventions as scanners, synthesizer keyboards and speech-recognition systems. He forecast in 1990 that within a decade, a computer would defeat the best human chess player. Only seven years later, grandmaster Garry Kasparov was beaten by the IBM computer Deep Blue.