Making simple phone calls can not only be a pain in the ass, it can bring some people to their bloody knees with anxiety. Some say it’s a generational thing, I argue phone calls outside of personal realms are redundant. Any service that doesn’t offer a way to book online is doing themselves a disservice.
Anyway, Google may have just solved this problem by making the damn phone call for you. Demonstrated at the company’s I/O 2018 conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai played an actual recording of the Google Assistant booking a haircut for someone and it’s equal parts incredible and fucking terrifying.
See for yourself.
Holy shit. It even adds in sounds like “uhh” and “um” to make it sound more human. The people on the other end of the phone don’t even seem to realise that they’re talking to a fucking machine. Very handy for when the robots want us to die.
The way it’s able to respond to complexities within the call so seamlessly is unbelievable to watch, but you also have to wonder how many of these recordings were made and how many failed in the process.
“The amazing thing is that Assistant can actually understand the nuances of conversation,” Pichai said. “We’ve been working on this technology for many years. It’s called Google Duplex.”
He also wants to make it clear that the technology is still very much in development, but does plan on testing it within the Assistant environment over the summer in the US, so our winter.
“We really want it to work in cases, say, if you’re a busy parent in the morning and your kid is sick and you want to call for a doctor’s appointment,” Pachai said. “The system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.”
While it can allegedly complete most tasks pretty well, there were situations during testing where it needed to hand the conversation over to a human. Even robots can get flustered on the phone, you know?
I, for one, can’t wait for Google to make my awkward calls for me. I wonder if it’s any good at prank calls.
