By Google has unveiled the next advancement in its ongoing quest to make every secretarial role on Earth redundant.
The Google Duplex, which was shown off at Google's I/O 2018 developers conference, can book appointments and events by working from the user's data and their calendar appointments - and can convince the humans on the other end of the line that they're speaking to another person.
The AI PA ran through its fairly convincing range of vocal tics during a chat with a hair salon (its "um" and "uhhhh" were spot-on, though its "mm-hmm" sounded a bit passive-aggressive) and had a slightly irritating Valley Girl-style upward inflection.
Meanwhile the male voice, which attempted to book a table at a Chinese restaurant in the second demonstration, sounded a bit like a very bored Bill Hader.
In both demos, the person on the other end of the phone apparently didn't twig that they were chatting to their future master, and blithely did the robot's bidding.
Google chief exec Sundar Pichai presented the demos. "The amazing thing is the Assistant can actually understand the nuances of conversation. We have been working on this technology for many years," said Pichai. "It brings together all our investments over the years in natural language understanding, deep learning, [and] text-to-speech."
It all sounds pretty impressive so far, but we don't know yet whether it'll be able to understand the nuances of conversation to the extent that it can bail out of PPI cold calls on the user's behalf.
