![]() ![]() Today's Google Assistant requires authoritative, direct, perfect speech in order to process a command. ![]() And Duplex was fine with it.ĭuplex patiently waited for me to awkwardly stumble through my first ever table reservation while I sloppily wrote down the time and fumbled through a basic back and forth about Google's reservation for four people at 7pm on Thursday. I've never taken a restaurant reservation in my life, let alone one with an audience and an engineering crew monitoring every utterance. And you know what? I sucked at taking this reservation. Immediately, I realized this was much more than I was expecting: Google PR, Google engineers, restaurant staff, and several other journalists were intently watching and listening to me take this call over the speaker. Listening to recordings of Duplex are one thing, but participating in a call with Google's phone bot (in front of a live audience, no less) is a totally different experience. I walked up to the front of the presentation area, picked up the ringing receiver, and the call started on the phone and over the loudspeaker. In my group, I took the first phone call from Google Duplex. Some put in an effort to confuse Duplex and throw it some curveballs, but this AI worked flawlessly within the very limited scope of a restaurant reservation. To start, a Google rep went around the room and took reservation requirements from the group, things like "What time should the reservation be for?" or "How many people?" Our requirements were punched into a computer, and the phone soon rang. Journalists-err, restaurant employees-could dictate the direction of the call however they so choose. Over the course of the event, we heard several calls, start to finish, handled over a live phone system. After he said no, THEP's owner hurriedly jogged over to the phone to speak to a genuine customer.ĭuring the demonstration period, things went much more according to plan. The Google rep quickly shot a "Wait, did you start a call?" question at the engineer in the corner. ![]() In-between demos at one point, the phone unexpectedly started ringing. The THEP restaurant phone proved to very much be a real, live phone line. ![]() We know it can start a call with a named business using Google Maps info.) (Fortunately, voice activation seems like the least important part of Google Duplex. So for an afternoon at least, I wasn't Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica Reviews Editor-I was Ron Amadeo, THEP restaurant employee waiting to field "live" phone calls from a bot. Even better, the company would let me talk directly with the infamous AI. Then all of a sudden, Google said it was ready to talk more about Duplex. Other than promising Duplex would announce itself as a robot in the future, Google had been pretty quiet about the project since the event. People questioned the ethics of an AI that pretended to be human, wiretap laws were called into question, and some even questioned if the demo was faked. The short, pre-recorded I/O showcase soon set off a firestorm of debate on the Web. Its demo even came complete with artificial speech disfluencies like "um" and "uh." The short demo felt like the culmination of Google's various voice-recognition and speech-synthesis capabilities: Google's voice bot could call up businesses and make an appointment on your behalf, all while sounding shockingly similar-some would say deceivingly similar-to a human. At I/O 2018, Google shocked the world with a demo of " Google Duplex," an AI system for accomplishing real-world tasks over the phone. Next to the TV was a podium with the Thai restaurant's actual phone-not some new company smartphone, the ol' analogue restaurant line. The company bought out the restaurant for the day, cleared away the tables, and built a little presentation area complete with a TV, loudspeaker, and chairs. Roughly two months after its annual I/O conference, Google this week invited Ars and several other journalists to the THEP Thai Restaurant in New York City. NEW YORK-Evidently, I didn't walk into a run-of-the-mill press event. ![]()
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