Google's 'Duplex' takes one step closer to help humans, may run call centres

Duplex lets AI mimic a human voice to make appointments and book tables through phone calls.

By ET Bureau | Jul 06, 2018, 11.58 AM IST

SAN FRANCISCO: Google's voice-calling "Duplex" - which lets Artificial Intelligence (AI) mimic a human voice to make appointments and book tables through phone calls - may soon enter call centres assisting humans with customer queries.

According to a report in The Information late on Thursday, an unnamed insurance company has shown interest in "Duplex" which could "handle simple and repetitive customer calls" before taking help from a human if the conversation gets complicated.

Google, however, said in a statement that the company is not testing "Duplex" with any enterprise clients.

"We're currently focused on consumer use cases for the 'Duplex' technology and we aren't testing 'Duplex' with any enterprise clients," a Google spokesperson told Engadget in a statement.

"'Duplex' is designed to operate in very specific use cases, and currently we're focused on testing with restaurant reservations, hair salon booking and holiday hours with a limited set of trusted testers," the company added.

At its annual developer conference in May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced "Duplex" and demonstrated how the AI system could book an appointment at a salon and a table at a restaurant.

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The lens can copy any text from the real world into your phone. This is something Google has demonstrated before, but now it sounds like the feature is ready and actually coming to Google Lens. You’ll be able to point your phone’s camera at text in the real world — say, a written down Wi-Fi password — grab that text, and then paste it into a text field on your smartphone. And now it’s also going to help you buy fashionable things. Google Lens still isn’t perfect at identifying precise items of clothing, but Google thinks it can get close enough. The company is introducing a new “style match” feature that will scan something the camera is pointed at and help you buy it from internet retailers. Sounds like a dream come true for Pinterest fans. But will Amazon be among those stores?

In the demo, the Google Assistant sounded like a human.

It used Google DeepMind's new "WaveNet" audio-generation technique and other advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to replicate human speech patterns.

However, tech critics raised questions on the morality of the technology, saying it was developed without proper oversight or regulation.

Microsoft has showcased a similar technology it has been testing in China.

At an AI event in London in May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company's "Xiaoice" social chat bot has 500 million "friends" and more than 16 channels for Chinese users to interact with it through WeChat and other popular messaging services.

"Xiaoice" interacts in text conversations but now the company has started allowing the chat bot to call people on their phones.

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Even before the event kicked off, CEO Sundar Pichai assured fixing bugs in things that matter the most, like burger emoji and floating foam on beer mug emoji.

With 7000 people present at Shoreline Amphitheater for the event this year, Pichai and his team amused the audience with their newly-developed features at Mountain View, California.

Better and smoother updates in AI, Assistant, Photos, News will soon make lives easy for most people.

Missed the live event? Here's a quick round-up of what Google has in store for your in the coming few days, weeks and months.