Alibaba already has a voice assistant way better than Google's

In May, Google made quite the splash when it unveiled Duplex, its eerily humanlike voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. It seemed to mark a new milestone in speech generation and natural-language understanding, and it pulled back the curtain on what the future of human-AI interaction might look like. But while Google slowly rolls out the feature in a limited public launch, Alibaba's own voice assistant has already been clocking overtime. Jin Rong, the dean of Alibaba's Machine Intelligence and Technology Lab, said the agent was already servicing millions of customer requests a day. By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters and notifications from MIT Technology Review.