Here's Google's AI Assistant Booking An Appointment Over A Phone Call Just Like A Human
Always one of its strong suits, Google announced it plans to go all in on artificial intelligence with the next iteration of Android and the products that run the operating system. As a taste of that at Google IO, the company showed a video of its AI assistant booking an appointment over the phone — you know, just like a human assistant would.
Watch:
Notice how human the voice sounds and how "she" responds to phrases like "Just gimme one second" with an agreeable and natural sounding "mhmm." Cool, but also a little eerie. Here's the end of that call:
Danny Sullivan, Google's "search liaison," posted these clips to Twitter, ending with one he says "didn't go so well." But we'd have to disagree with the Google employee. Even though the caller (actually an AI assistant) did not achieve the initial goal (booking a reservation for four people), that's only because that wasn't possible. Aside from that, it was just a simple phone call between a robot and a human, executed with almost no awkwardness at all. Watch:
It's only a matter of time until the machines will be able to prank call Starbucks and order four thousand lattes.