Google first showed off Duplex by having the AI book haircut appointments, but the Assistant feature was unexpectedly left by the wayside in favor of making restaurant reservations. It appears to have come roaring back, though. VentureBeat has discovered that Duplex is now ready to book haircut appointments in the real world. When you find a barber or hairstylist that requires a phone call to book an appointment, you tell Assistant details like your preferred timing, cut type, and even your choice of stylist -- the AI then handles the call for you. As before, Duplex will warn that the call is automated and being recorded. If the hairstylist doesn't want to be recorded, Duplex will pass the call to a human operator.

In May, Google debuted Duplex, an artificially intelligent assistant that can make mundane phone calls on behalf of a human. Now, Google is looking to partner with companies that want to use its human-sounding Duplex AI for tasks such as fielding customer service calls or telemarketing, according to a report by The Information. According to The Information's sources, at least one large insurance company has already expressed interest in using Duplex to handle customer service calls. Testing, they note, is still in the early stages, and the system is several months from going live. Google has refuted the report.

The robots on the other side of the customer support line could soon start to sound a lot more human. Google is reportedly shopping its Duplex AI system around as a tool for call centers, according to The Information, including a large insurance company. Duplex would handle simple calls for the insurance company, and if the customer started asking complex questions the bot can't handle a human would step in, according to the report. However, it's unlikely that AI research will cease after mastering simple conversations, meaning call centers could one day be largely automated using this technology. The AI system was first debuted at Google's I/O developer conference in May, where it was demonstrated making calls to local businesses to place reservations on behalf of Google Assistant users.

After seeing how Google's Duplex AI was able to book a table at a restaurant by fooling a human maître d' into thinking it was human, I wondered if it might be possible for us mere hackers to pull off the same feat. What could you or I do without Google's legions of ace AI programmers and racks of neural network training hardware? Let's look at the ways we can make a natural language bot of our own. As you'll see, it's entirely doable. One of the first steps in engineering a solution is to break it down into smaller steps.