Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test?
This conversational AI changes everything
I think it was the first “Um.” That was the moment when I realized I was hearing something extraordinary: A computer carrying out a completely natural and very human-sounding conversation with a real person. And it wasn’t just a random talk. This conversation had a purpose, a destination: to make an appointment at a hair salon.
The entity making the call and appointment was Google Assistant running Duplex, Google’s still experimental AI voice system and the venue was Google I/O, Google’s yearly developer conference, which this year focused heavily on the latest developments in AI, Machine- and Deep-Learning.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained that what we were hearing was a real phone call made to a hair salon that didn’t know it was part of an experiment or that they were talking to a computer. He launched Duplex by asking Google Assistant to book a haircut appointment for Tuesday morning. The AI did the rest.
Duplex made the call and, when someone at the salon picked up, the voice AI started the conversation with:
“Hi, I’m calling to book a woman’s hair cut appointment for a client, um, I’m looking for something on May third?”
