Google's New Voice Bot Sounds, Um, Maybe Too Real

Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated new AI technology that can use human-like speech to carry on phone conversations at the Google I/O 2018 Conference on Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif. Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated new AI technology that can use human-like speech to carry on phone conversations at the Google I/O 2018 Conference on Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif. On the first day of Google's annual conference for developers, the company showed off a robot with a voice so convincingly human that it was able to call a salon and book a haircut – never revealing that it wasn't a real person making the call. CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the new AI technology on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference, playing audio of a female-voiced bot speaking with a receptionist over the phone, and then a male-voiced bot making a restaurant reservation. The bot peppers its speech with "um", "uh", and "mmm hmm" in order to imitate the tics and rhythms of human speech.