The demo was impressive, I’ll give them that. A machine - Google’s voice assistant - booked an appointment at a hair salon. And then a table at a restaurant.
Not online, or through some automated system. But by talking to a human. Over the phone. Blimey.
Google Duplex, unveiled at the firm’s annual developers’ conference, has incredible potential - albeit one that’s laced with a hint of terror over AI’s continued march into our lives.
Duplex is a system that can take a user's data - like wanting a hair cut on a specific day at 12pm - and relay it using an automated voice to a human being, reacting to questions and the irregularities of a typical person’s speech.
The voice is designed to sound completely natural, complete with the ums and uh huhs found in everyday life. The recipient of the call, ideally, is none the wiser.
You should take a minute to listen to the examples on Google’s blog post about the idea, published on Tuesday.
'Experimenting'
Now. Let’s start with the obvious question. Does it work? We don’t know.
Frustratingly, Google was unable to show us this technology in action. We have no idea if the calls shared today were the successful calls out of many, many attempts - nor do we know if the recipient was prepped beforehand. We don’t know how easy the system is to fool, or just confuse enough to render it useless. Anyone who uses Google’s Assistant today knows how often it stumbles over a lot of basic requests.