The Do Not Call registry may have eliminated some of the annoyance of having to deal with unwanted phone calls but there’s still a modern inconvenience that we have to deal with: Robo calls. Those automated messages that you receive upon answering your phone, even when doing so from trusted sources that you do want to hear from.
As Wired puts it, “When a robot rings your phone, you can usually tell right away. Its voice is melodic, it rarely stumbles, and it’s unnaturally efficient. The voice betrays its origin before it even has the chance to tell you that you qualify for a free loan, your mortgage payment is overdue, or that your input would really be valuable for a customer survey. Knowing it’s a robot also makes it easy to hang up.”
That’s where Google Duplex comes in. Somehow able to mimic the complexity and nuance of human speech Duplex is the future of Robo calls. And here’s the best part. It’ll be a part of Google Assistant, able to make calls on behalf of ordinary citizens like you and me, not just on behalf of telemarketers.
For instance, with the technology at your beck and call you’ll be able to pass off the responsibility of making a dinner reservation or booking a nail appointment to your phone. That may not sound like much but it floored the audience at Google’s developer’s conference the other day as it proved that AI is getting remarkably close to passing the Turing Test, that moment in time where us humans wouldn’t be able to tell if we’re talking to man or machine.
From Wired:
“The big reveal was that neither of the voices who initiated the calls belonged to a human. They were bots, dispatched through Google Assistant and activated through a back-end system. But they sounded human: They said ‘Um’ and ‘Ohh, I gotcha’ and ended query statements with the raised pitch of a question mark. And, for the purpose of the demo, they completed tasks that normally fall to us mere mortals, whether than meant making a hair appointment or determining whether it would be better to just walk into a restaurant and take a gamble on a table.”
This technology has startling ramifications and further demonstrates just how committed Google is to AI. From object recognizing cameras to self-driving cars to do-it-all personal assistants Google is doubling down. And we all stand to benefit. One dinner reservation at a time.
Is Google Duplex the Greatest Idea Ever?
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