After the surprising presentation last May of Duplex – a system for booking restaurants and visits over the phone via its virtual assistant who pretends to be a person – Google had received a lot of criticism, for having underestimated the practical and ethical consequences for something artificial that sounded like this. “human”. More than a month later, the company is now determined to go further, launching public Duplex tests for the first time, but with precautions to avoid that interlocutors on the phone are led to think they are talking to a human being instead of a virtual assistant. The new system could prove to be crucial in defining a future in which we will interact more often and naturally with software programmed to speak and react to stimuli as we do.
Google announced Wednesday that Duplex will be trialled in the United States with a small group of people and businesses who have agreed to receive calls from the Google Assistant. For now, the system can only be used to confirm the opening hours of clubs and shops, while from the end of the summer it can be used to book restaurants.
After the May event, Google had faced criticism and reprimand from artificial intelligence experts, convinced that Duplex could be an obstacle in creating relationships of trust between users and automatic systems. In that demonstration, the assistant had initiated the call without defining himself as an automatic system, carrying on a very realistic conversation including pauses, noises of assent and hesitations typical of a normal phone call. The fear was that such a system would make it impossible in the future to distinguish a human interlocutor from a synthetic one on the phone, leading to many practical problems and trust on the part of users.
Google has taken the criticism and made some significant changes to the way Duplex works. Now the system immediately introduces itself to the interlocutor saying that it is an automatic service: “Hi, I'm Google Assistant, I'm calling for a reservation on behalf of my client”. Google initially wanted to avoid making the call so formal, thinking it might discourage a more natural reaction from the person on the phone, making them uncomfortable. The fear was also that the call could be confused with one of the telemarketing ones for the sale of commercial offers, increasing the chances of being closed even before starting the conversation.
The new presentation sentence should clear the field of any misunderstandings and keep the promise made by Google after the first criticisms of the system. The company does not seem to have changed its mind about using a voice that mimics the human one almost perfectly, without the classic metallic noise of the voice assistants we have been used to so far. Even in the new demonstration (you can see it in the video below), the voice of Google Assistant sounds human in all respects, a feature that according to its developers incentives the interlocutor to stay on the phone longer and alleviates the weirdness of speaking. with a software. Hesitations help to make the reactions of the Google Assistant more polite, for example when the person on the other end of the phone is wrong or does not understand the request.
In addition to criticism of the ethical aspects, suspicions were raised in May about the Google Assistant's actual ability to handle moderately difficult conversations. In fact, the capacity of the system seems to be very limited and calibrated on the booking of tables and visits, the request for opening hours and little else. If you try to get out of the way and bring the conversation to other topics, Duplex shows some difficulties and tries as soon as possible to bring the discussion back to the reservation. Not bad, considering that such interesting conversations rarely open up when booking a restaurant, but the system's lack of flexibility still demonstrates how far we are still from creating artificial intelligences with which to converse freely on any topic.
Alphabet, the holding company that controls Google, is one of the largest and most influential companies in the world. Its products influence the evolution of entire sectors of the market, so its approach could be decisive for the many companies that deal with artificial intelligence. Duplex is one example of the ways Google wants to make our interactions with virtual assistants more common and widespread. Modes, tones and functions are being defined, but in the event of their success they could become the standard for the future that awaits us, and which goes far beyond booking a dinner at a restaurant.
