The Terminator is (Robo) Calling – Rule the Robots – Medium

In the AI arms race, Google's I/O conference is akin to Russia's Victory Day parade -- an annual, carefully-orchestrated pullback of the curtains hiding otherwise-secret projects, designed to showcase technical prowess and achievements. This years I/O highlight was Duplex, Google Assistant feature that-- using recurrent neural-network-based AI (and a telephone) -- will schedule appointments for you. To demonstrate, Duplex called two businesses: a hair-salon and a restaurant. With lifelike voices and natural conversation flow -- including appropriate disfluencies (the technical term for "hmms," "uh's", etc.) --Duplex appeared to fool both humans into thinking a living, breathing, potential customer was on the line. By displaying behavior indistinguishable from that of a human, some think Duplex could pass the Turing test.