Google's Duplex uses AI to mimic humans, but only sometimes
On a recent afternoon at the Lao Thai Kitchen restaurant, the telephone rang and the caller ID read “ Google Assistant .” Jimmy Tran, a waiter, answered the phone. The caller was a man with an Irish accent hoping to book a dinner reservation for two on the weekend. This was no ordinary booking. It came through Google Duplex, a free service that uses artificial intelligence to call restaurants and — mimicking a human voice — speak on our behalf to book a table. The feature, which had a limited release about a year ago, recently became available to a larger number of Android devices and iPhones. The voice of the Irish man sounded eerily human. When asked whether he was a robot, the caller immediately replied, “No, I’m not a robot,” and laughed. “ It sounded very real,” Tran said in an interview after hanging up the call with Google. “It was perfectly human.” Google later confirmed, to our disappointment, that the caller had been telling the truth: He was a person working in a