Hot Clicks: Google's AI Can Schedule Your Hair Cut

At Google's I/O 2018 conference, company CEO Sundar Pichai presented Google Assistant's newest feature: it can make phone calls on your behalf. On stage, he played the recording of a phone call placed by the assistant to a hair salon to schedule an appointment on a specific day, within a specific time slot. And the voice sounded completely natural and realistic, even adding "mm-hmms" and "uhms." It's called Google Duplex, and Pichai said the assistant can understand the nuances of conversation. It's something Google has been working on for many years, and while it seems like superadvanced artificial intelligence (Pichai said it can react intelligently even during an unexpected conversation), it's still under development.