On Tuesday Google had the keynote of its yearly developer conference, the Google IO 2018. They use this event to present new features and Ideas to the public which are going to be released in the upcoming time. They had some interesting updates for their Google Assistant as well as a big update for Android which reminds me of iOS and what Apple changed last year… but in this post I don’t want to hate about Google and what they do! I want to talk about Google Duplex!
“What is Google Duplex?” you might ask me… so, Google Duplex is a part of Google Assistant which allows you to make calls. Okay, making calls isn’t anything new, phones are as old as the headphone jack and absolutely nothing revolutionary, but it’s not the call itself that’s new: Google Duplex ist the possibility to tell your Google Assistant to make calls for you! For example you could say “Hey Google, make an appointment at the hairdresser on Monday at 1 PM.” So Google Assistant calls your favorite hairdresser, talks to the person on the other side like a human and makes an appointment for you while the hairdresser on the phone doesn’t recognize it as a machine. That’s fckn crazy isn’t it? The speech of Duplex is so human like, that you wouldn’t recognize a difference! When it asks for an appointment, it doesn’t say “Hey, I’d like to have an appointment on Monday at 1 PM”, it says “Hey, umm, do you have an appointment for… hmm… let’s say Monday at, umm, 1 PM?” and if there is none available it asks for an alternative and so on… this tool is so incredibly smart and futuristic… And that takes me to think about what will happen in the future… if a tool, a free tool, from Google enables you to let it make calls and the other side thinks it is a normal human talking there, where will it lead us to? Will we have to always ask us if the other side is a human or a bot?
I think this technology is incredible and I’d love if Siri would also be able to be nearly as smart as the Google Assistant already is, but would I want to be called by a bot that doesn’t act like a bot but acts like a human? I’m not sure about that…
Here you can find the demo from the keynote if you’d like to see Google Duplex in action! 🙂
