Google Duplex lets a robot make phone calls for you (The 3:59, Ep. 399)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. I'm Joanie Salzman. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Google I/O developer conference yesterday was an experimental technology called Google Duplex. It's basically a human sounding Google Assistant that can make phone calls to people on your behalf to schedule restaurant reservations. Or hair appointments. What do you guys think of this thing? Creepy. I feel really bad that I was actually fooled by it. Because, I wasn't paying attention to the presentation. I was working on another story when they demo'd duplex. But I was listening in. I'm like why are they just playing two people on the phone just talking. I don't get it. Everyone else in the room was like that's crazy. What's going on. That's just two people talking, I don't get it, what's the? To me, what was interesting about it too was that to make a robot sound like a person, it almost seemed like too easy. All you had to do was elongate certain words, throw in an mhm or an it was like Is it really that easy to- I mean, I think those demos though showed like, they must have called them the most polite buinesses in town [LAUGH] like- Well they also had the demo where the woman had english as a second language who was responding. And was hard to under, I mean as an english speaker Talking on the phone. It would've been hard for me to understand, just to show how the artificial intelligence was at listening to someone maybe who's not rude, but who is having difficulty understanding what a person, quote unquote, talking in English is asking and then responding in a way that's broken English as well. Yeah, do you think that this is a good idea? Is this something that Google should actually be offering? I think that no matter what, maybe we can all agree that there needs to be some ground rules about when you devise a robot to talk to people to be transparent about the fact that they are talking to a robot, right? I'm very worried about the implications that this has if this technology gets to, you know, like telemarketers and robo callers in the sense that like now they can do this on a massive scale and you won't know that it's a bot immediately. There is a version of that. I definitely have gotten calls for that before but they're really lousy. Yeah, so. You are totally right. Yeah, it would get much better and then it would be much harder for you to tell that's like... They'll be a machine running, like this telemarketing operation, where they're calling you eight times a day over it. Yeah, to be clear, Google said that they do plan on letting the human on the other side of the phone know that they're talking to a robot. It's still unclear, exactly, how they're actually gonng do that. And they plan on slowly rolling this out, because it is experimental. Next, Google also reveled a new feature for its Google Assistant that will let you ask follow-up questions. To it without constantly saying hey Google or okay Google. The feature is coming this summer. Amazon unveiled a similar feature in March that's already live. Do you guys like this idea? Is it interesting? I just wish they would give you The ability to change the wake word for it. Saying hey Google a lot is annoying, and this kind of addresses that. But also saying hey Google at all is really annoying. Cuz when I was using my Amazon Echoes, I would just say Echo for it. Hey Google is very annoying to say all the time. Yeah I think just saying Google might be a little off. I'm not really sure. Last, Google's new Android operating system, Android P, wants to help you curb your phone addiction. Alfred, you read about this. Give us some highlights, what's interesting about it? Yeah, so they introduced several new features. One of the biggest ones is Android Dashboard. It's an app on your phone that you can see how much time you're spending on Certain apps they tells you like how many times you've unlock your phone data, what apps you use the most, the idea of being like hey, maybe you shouldn't spend 8 hours a day you know on YouTube watching like dog videos the whole day. I'd be terrified to see some of the statictics. It's that something that you would actually use? I think that is, yeah. I think that I would use some of these features for sure. And I think it's interesting that these directly go against Google's own well being. [LAUGH] Right. [LAUGH] Getting you to stop using your phone, they're in the business of getting you addicted to all their services. Totally. So it's interesting that they're Allowing. They're listening to consumers that are fed up with how these services feel like they take over their lives in an exploitative way, in some cases. Yeah, if you wanna read more about these stories, check us out on CNET. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. I'm Joan E. Solsman. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]