The demonstration given by Sundar Pichai on Duplex at Google’s I/O 2018, Annual Developer Conference stirred up quite a bit of squabble. The conversation held was presumed to be gimmicked by CEO and somewhat manipulated. A storm of criticism took all over the internet after the demo and except few, the majority of people took a conservative approach.
Those who were conservative about the Google’s innovation might be a pessimist or haven’t recognized the worth of technology and possibilities it could give birth to.
Apparently, Google has zipped the mouths and proved that Google Duplex is exactly as it was demonstrated at I/O conference. Ars Technica was called upon to have a live demo in New York. Google rented out a Thai Restaurant and asked journalists to come in and take reservation from Duplex for a day.
Representatives from different media outlets had the chance to talk with Duplex AI and the majority of them were flabbergasted. The company vacated the space for one day and setup a presentation area with loudspeaker, chairs, and television. Thai’s actual phone was also placed next to TV on a podium.
Duplex sounds more like a human than any semi-robotic voice assistants we use to experience in Siri, Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri. It gimmicked the voice of a human with the addition of Umm, Uh and phrases like that. The phrases also haunted the people during the conference. Criticizers were anxious about the moral consequences of artificially intelligent robot misleading a human being thinking he or she was talking to another person.
On Wednesday, Google cleared all the doubts and revealed how it will let people know that they were talking to an AI. After the software says hello to the person on the other end, it will identify itself by saying: “Hi, I am the Google Assistant”, calling to make a reservation for the client. The automated call will be a recorded one.
The company claimed that it would disclose the call being recorded in states that legally require the disclosure. Eleven states including Florida, California, and Illinois require the consent of every party in order to ensure the recording lawful, according to Digital Media Law Project.
Google didn’t allow anyone to take any of its recordings but provided them with a video. Duplex is capable of talking in different voices of both male and female. Moreover, it can personify various personalities.
The most astonishing thing about Duplex is that there is not a single duplex voice. Every time someone calls, duplex comes up with a new voice with unique personality either of male or female. Some of the voices sounded younger while others sounded cute and high-pitched.
Overall, the AI technology worked flawlessly and was quite convincing. Duplex also repeated the information if requested. However, improvements need to be made when it comes to spelling out names. It didn’t flow smoothly as a human would spell his or her name. It sounded much unprofessionally for most of the part.
Google is still working on it to fix small issues before launching the system. However, the date of rolling out the new technology is not revealed yet, but it shouldn’t be too far.
