Is Google Looking to Takeover Call Centers With Duplex AI?

Google’s Duplex voice-call AI catches the attention of call centers.

The Google AI bot sounded real enough to fool the salon executive at the other end.

(Photo: Google Developer/Youtube)

According to reports, Google's Duplex voice-call AI has cached the attention of call centers, but Google insists that their current focus right now is firmly on consumers. Google's voice-calling "Duplex" can make appointments and book tables through phone calls with its Artificial Intelligence and may soon enter call centers to assist humans with customer queries.

“Duplex would handle simple calls for the insurance company, and if the customer started asking complex questions the bot can’t handle a human would step in.”

The Information report

“We’re currently focused on consumer use cases for the ‘Duplex’ technology and we aren’t testing ‘Duplex’ with any enterprise clients.”

Google spokesperson told to Engadget 

The company added, “'Duplex is designed to operate in very specific use cases, and currently we're focused on testing with restaurant reservations, hair salon booking and holiday hours with a limited set of trusted testers."

Duplex uses Google Deep Mind’s new “WaveNet” audio-generation technique and other advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to mimic human speech patterns. However, tech critics raised questions on the morality of the technology, saying it was developed without proper oversight or regulation.  

Not every business has an online booking system, so in some cases, you have to talk to human beings to make a reservation.

This video below demonstrates how Duplex AI system made its debut at Google’s I/O developer conference in May this year.

The testing is still in the very early stages and is likely months or more away to roll out.

(With inputs from IANS and Google AI Blog )