Google Duplex: Company reveals 'terrifying' artificially intelligent bot that calls people up and pretends to be human

Google has revealed a "terrifying" new technology that you could use without ever knowing it. Among a host of announcements at its annual IO conference, it revealed that it had been working on a tool called "Duplex". It is an artificially intelligence assistant that can call people up and interact with them – without anyone ever knowing they were speaking to a robot. On stage, for instance, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed how the bot could call people up and book a hairdressers' appointment. It went through the entire process of booking it – referring to the human as its "client" – without the person on the other end of the call ever realising that they were talking to a robot.