Since I wrote my column about Google Duplex in Scientific American, Google has cautiously moved ahead with testing this controversial technology. As you may recall, what Duplex does is to make reservations at restaurants and hair salons—by placing a phone call to their human receptionists. It perfectly impersonates a human voice, complete with “um”s, hesitations, and realistic inflections.
When CEO Sundar Pichai first played a recording of a Duplex call at the company’s developer conference, the human receptionist had no idea she was speaking with an AI assistant. That, critics said, was the most objectionable part of the whole thing. Robots should not try to trick humans.
Google Duplex is now in testing in the real world with actual businesses—on a small, slow scale. In this testing phase, the system works only with a hand-picked set of consumers and businesses who both know they’re part of the testing program.
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Furthermore, Duplex now begins the call with full disclosure, along these lines: “Hi, I’m the Google Assistant, calling to make a reservation for a client. This automated call will be recorded. Can I book a table for Tuesday the third?”
(That bit about “will be recorded” plays only in states where notifying your party that you’re recording the call is required by law.)
In other words, there’s no longer any concern that the human receptionist is being “deceived” or “manipulated.”
So why, in that case, does the Google AI voice still include “umms” and “ahs” and human-sounding stumbles and pauses?
Because when Google tried a straight-up digital voice, “it didn’t work,” according to Scott Huffman, VP of engineering for Assistant, in an interview with The Verge. “We got a lot of hangups, we got a lot of incompletion of the task. People didn’t deal well with how unnatural it sounded.”
If the human receptionist goes wildly off-topic or otherwise confuses the AI, the call gets handed off to a team of human operators who take over from there. That backup system kicks in, at the moment, once in every five calls.
Over time, the success rate will improve; Google Assistant will improve; and the world will get used to calls from human-sounding robots. Soon, we won’t object to them any more than we object to voice menus when we call an airline or a corporation—and Google Assistant will continue on its quest to get smarter.