05.14
Last week’s I/O 2018 event in Mountain View, Calif., was notable for one main reason: the introduction of Google Duplex, a promising and slightly menacing artificial intelligence service. As the tech giant demonstrated in a video that’s been viewed more than 18 million times on Facebook alone, Duplex—an extension of Google Assistant—can make phone calls on behalf of its users. One example showed Duplex seamlessly setting up a hair salon appointment with a (human) woman who didn’t sound like she had any clue she was talking to a robot. Duplex can quickly and naturally respond to complex phrases and has verbal tics that make it seem human-like. Google says it will start testing Duplex more widely this summer to perform tasks such as making restaurant reservations and determining a store’s holiday hours. The company admits Duplex can still be overwhelmed, and there’s a system in place to transfer from AI to an operator when problems arise. Beyond that, worries have already started piling up about what this could mean for the future of person-to-person interactions and whether a service like Duplex is ethically (or legally) sound. Google has since promised that Duplex will somehow identify itself as AI on the phone calls, but there are unanswered questions about if/how the company will be recording conversations or storing user information. Over the past seven days, “Google Duplex” has a 64 percent positive score on Twitter, with words driving the Vibe like “amazing,” “clever,” “scary,” and “terrifying.” –Alex Shultz