Google Duplex gets closer to what we would call a human assistant. You give it a task by voice, with Google assistant, and it does the work. Here the work is making calls to restaurants to ensure reservations. The AI asks and answers clarifying questions of both the requester and the restaurant. The goal is to get a confirmation.
The 'creepiness' that is perhaps included is that the restaurant does not know its an AI voice, though in the test they are participating. Later Google implied the system would make that clear when calling. The video on the link below shows how it would work.
This kind of chatbot interaction obeys a 'script'. We have all internalized such scripts for dealing with people, or machines. If either party asks questions that are not interpretable in the script, we get confused too. And perhaps pass the person off ... to another script, or to some other resource in concierge fashion, which is what we did in our own brand experiments.
I like that they are doing this, if its useful people will get used to this idea of talking to a machine in new and more flexible ways. We have learned that already in just the past couple of years. Even when a machine starts the conversation.
Google brings its Duplex AI restaurant booking assistant to 43 states By Brian Heater@bheater in TechCrunch
No moment wowed the audience at last year’s I/O more than Duplex. The demo of the artificial intelligence restaurant and appointment booking program left many in the audience wondering whether Google had just pulled a fast one over on them.
Turns out, it’s real.
Over the summer, I got a chance to test drive Duplex at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan. And later in the year, the company rolled the program out in limited testing to restaurants in four U.S. cities. Today, it announced that it’s opening things up even more. ... "
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