www.wired.com/story/google-duple
How Google's Eerie Robot Phone Calls Hint at AI's Future
Google's new "Duplex" technology presents a significant tipping point for machine intelligence–powered virtual assistants.
«In the first demo, a woman calls a hair salon, where another woman answers the phone; the two go back and forth for approximately a minute before they figure out a time that works for a hair appointment. In the second demo, also about a minute, a man calls a restaurant to book a reservation; the woman on the receiving end has a heavy accent and isn't offering the best information, so the caller pivots to make a new request.
The big reveal was that neither of the voices who initiated the calls belonged to a human. They were bots, dispatched through Google Assistant and activated through a back-end system.»