Google rolls out public testing of Duplex. Google’s AI technology that can make human sounding phone calls on your behalf for reservations or appointments. We examine the impact, usefulness, and future of the technology.
Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang and Scott Johnson.
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Show Notes
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To Mr Scott Johnson. If you don’t see a need for something like Google Duplex then you have never tried to cancel Cable TV service. I would pay big bucks for an AI assistant to do that. I don’t need a dinner reservation, I need an assistant to deal with the unpleasant calls I have to make.
I will now get off of your lawn.
Scott, you kept saying how you think Google Duplex is the solution for a non-existent problem, but I think you’re thinking only from your perspective on this. You’re an outgoing person (you literally talk out loud for a living, after all!) and from what I can tell, work from home or places of your choosing. For those of us in office jobs, we’re finding ourselves more and more in “open environments”, which basically mean no walls, and no privacy. Even calling to set up a dinner reservation or a haircut suddenly becomes the domain of every one of your coworkers. Sometimes that’s just inconvenient, sometimes that’s an outright problem, depending on a variety or factors ranging from nosy coworkers to time management requirements at your job. Letting the Google Assistant do these mundane tasks for us means the ability to actual take care of these things that everyone needs to do from time to time, and do them without having to go out to our car to make a phone call or spend our only break from work during our lunch hour making these tedious calls.
Take all that and double it for those of us with introverted natures or social anxiety. And since this is a tech podcast, I’m sure you’re aware that there are a lot of us out there in those categories. Just making that call to set up a haircut can be anywhere from uncomfortable to terrifying. What a gift to be able to have the bot do that for us, and without broadcasting our business to our whole office!