Are you the kind of person that hates phone calls, or do you have too little time to handle them all?
Google has announced a system that will solve your problem. It is finally possible to have a natural conversation with computers. Google’s new AI system, Google Duplex, sounds as natural as a real human being! It understands, contextualizes and has correct timing.
Here is an example of how Duplex could schedule an appointment at the hair salon for you.
Of course, this could be invaluable in the business world. Duplex could:
- allow organizations to reduce their customer service teams,
- allow customers to book at any time, even in the middle of the night,
- remind customers about their upcoming appointments and reduce no-shows,
- give information that is not available online – and upload the information online to reduce similar calls.
One would expect that a system like this would have a lot of bugs and would not work in the real life. Watch Duplex talking to a woman that barely speaks English and making an appointment at a restaurant.
For normal users Duplex could also be very useful and could save people time. This graphic shows an usual way to use Duplex.
According to www.wired.com the technology is, unfortunately, not perfect yet. WIRED writer, Lauren Goode, answered a call in a demo in June. She was very surprised that Duplex sounded just like a real person and she thinks this can be disorientating. She managed, however, to confuse the bot by saying something about allergies in the middle of a discussion about available times for a restaurant reservation.
According to neowin.net, there is also going to be a new feature that works together with Duplex. It enables the Assistant to respond to and reject unwanted commercials with minimal imput. It will also provide transcripts.
Google has announced that Duplex will be available on their smartphones, Pixel. However, this is for now only available in a few big cities in the US. There is no information on when, or if at all, it is going to be launched in Europe, but for the moment it’s still considered in the experimental phase.
Do you think that Google Duplex will become a revolutionary system? What would you use it for? Let me know in the comments!
More info at:
AI Google Blog, 25th November 2018
Wired, 25th November 2018
TechRadar, 25th November 2018
VentureBeat, 25th November 2018
Business Insider, 25th November 2018
Neowin, 25th November 2018
It’s the nice article! I have speculated about that a little bit, and here’s what occurred to me. Today’s AI technologies are far from true intelligence. All these resources, which were worth dozens of billions of dollars were spent so that by human-like telephone conversation to solve 3 primitive tasks: reserve a table in a restaurant, sign up at the hairdresser, and find out opening hours on holidays. The limits of the capabilities of these applications, as a form of intelligence, should be a wake-up signal. If the machine learning on big data strategy can’t provide more meaningful tasks than reserving a restaurant (even in the hands of the most powerful AI company in the world), it’s time to revise this strategy. Then, another question raises, namely why the calls? After all, today everything has long since moved to the Internet and it is much easier to teach AI to place orders online, as was the case with the same Viv. It is hoped that Google Duplex will spread faster than telephone orders will finally sink into oblivion. As noted above, the technology is still in the process of development, so it is not fair to judge its prospects. Probably, with the start of testing we will be able to more fully assess its capabilities.