Uh, Did Google Fake Its Big A.I. Demo?

Sundar Pichai's demonstration of the company's new virtual-assistant technology, unveiled at the company's annual developer conference last week, was more unnerving than Pichai presumably intended it to be. Google Duplex, as the technology is called, represents a major leap forward in Silicon Valley's efforts to produce robots that sound like people. It can make phone calls to schedule appointments, say, or to reserve a table at a restaurant, using familiar human verbal tics and filler words--"uhm," "mmhmm," and "gotcha"--that make it eerily hard to tell that the voice on the other line is an artificial intelligence. To show the tech in action, Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant device--Google's answer to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa--calling and interacting with someone who was purportedly an employee at a hair salon to make an appointment. "What you're going to hear is the Google assistant actually calling a real salon to schedule an appointment for you," Pichai told the audience.