Google's Duplex wants to normalize bots speaking for humans

At Google's I/O developer conference this week there was a lot of news to unpack, but the story that seems to have captured people's imagination -- or fueled their nightmares -- is Duplex, the AI that enables Google Assistant to make phone calls for you. In the demo, Google Assistant goes back and forth in conversation with a person for about a minute to make a haircut reservation. In another demonstration, Google Assistant made a reservation at a restaurant. Duplex is still an experiment, CEO Sundar Pichai explained onstage Tuesday, an experiment that will continue with user testing this summer. Despite taking up less than two minutes in more than two hours of product rollouts and upgrades, its debut may mark a noteworthy moment in the history of conversational AI, and perhaps the history of communication, as one of the first publicly known instances of a bot proactively working on a human's behalf in the world.