Google Duplex in Chrome: the experiment begins
It has been called the most clever chatbot of all times, and – minus some speed-bumps – its development is running steady: after the restaurant booking manager (that, hearing from the States, still puzzles many field’s operators!), Google Duplex is now going to tackle Chrome, given the fact that the Mountain View team is experimenting the integration between this two Big G’s products.
What is Google Duplex?
Google Duplex is one of the most innovative Google’s projects, now available to most part of the United States (48 on 50, basically everyone but Kentucky and Louisiana): we are talking about an evolved A.I. system that allows specific kind of users to access operations such as a restaurant’s booking or a call completely managed by the bot. It will not be the user, then, to talk to the restaurant employee, but Google Duplex directly with the help of Google Assistant, using an A.I. based human sounding voice.
Google Duplex has been announced for the first time by company CEO Sundar Pichai throughout the Google I/O developers’s conference in May 2018, and in the following months the experiment began: in November 2018, the corporation announced that Duplex had been launched for a selected number of public users in some United States cities, right after the fix of some security issues.
For instance, compared to early tests, the A.I. identifies itself as “Google” when someone answers the phone and warns the addressee that the call is being recorded (leaving to him the decision to transfer on a unrecorded line).
Limits and doubts on the system
A nearly sci-fi tool, that attracted almost immediately some controversies and critiques, both on privacy and security. Many other doubts on Duplex are rising in the United States: The Verge, for instance, recounts that the restaurant managers are still confused and baffled when the A.I. calls, also because they don’t always succeed to identify the caller and link it to Google.
The New York Times has tested Google Duplex in some local restaurants, instead, with mixed results; in partic