In this age of disinformation, where fake news thrives and the public has trust issues with technology, Google designed a machine that can deceive humans. Gosh, what could go wrong? Google's engineers used artificial intelligence to give birth to something called Duplex -- a digital assistant that can call a local business to make appointments on your behalf over the phone. And the receptionists on the other end of the call have no idea they are conversing back and forth with a robot. Not only is the typical robotic voice gone, but Google took extra steps to disguise the system to sound more like a human.

Just in case you have not listened to the telephone calls placed by Google's latest conversational application code-named "Duplex" you should. Google Duplex can place calls and make restaurant reservations or book appointments to hair salons. Speech recognition and spoken dialogue technology has had the capability of successfully completing such tasks for over a decade now. What is exciting and frankly also a bit scary is that for the few (probably cherry-picked) recordings made available at the Google AI blog, the robotic caller is practically indistinguishable from a human. Google Duplex is not the first conversational system that passes the Turing test with flying colors for a few minutes: chatbots have been competing in this arena for years now.