Google Duplex and the canny rise: a UX pattern – UX Collective

At Google's I/O developer conference in 2018, Alphabet's Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the amazing Duplex feature of the Google Assistant, still in development. It was all over the internet in short order, but in case you didn't see it: In the demo, he asks his Google Assistant to schedule a haircut for him, and "behind the scenes" (though we get to see it in action in this demo) the Assistant spins off an agent that calls the salon in a voice that is amazingly human-sounding. Give it a listen in the video below. Later in the demo he has the Assistant (with a male voice this time) contact a restaurant to make reservations. There's a lot to discuss in these scenarios, but for this pattern we're focusing on its human-sounding-ness.