WASHINGTON – These days, it’s quite common for businesses, or networkoperators, to set up a bot/robot to answer your phone that redirects you toa human operator or processes your request. It’s easy to guess that the“lady” over the phone is merely a pre-recorded response that plays onrepeat, cannot hear what you are saying, and is pretty stupid.
Google is looking to change that – it showed off a new AI feature of the GoogleAssistantlink>thatis able to naturally communicate with real humans over the phone and carryout user tasks such as setting appointments.
Using this feature, called Google Duplex, users will be able to ask foropening hours or make appointments in restaurants by simply instructingGoogle Assistant to do it for them.
The AI, on request, makes an autonomous call to a particular business andcarries out the task assigned to it except, this time, it converses ascleanly and “realistically” as a human would. It uses natural human-likelanguage and does not sound like an eerie, melodic robot.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, demonstrated its abilities at Google I/O 2018through recordings of real calls made by the Google Assistant.