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Google today launched Google Duplex, its AI chat agent that can make appointments over the phone, in Spain to automate the updating of business hours in Google Search and Google Maps. For the first time, he is speaking in Spanish: Duplex previously only spoke in English.
The expansion follows a pilot in New New Zealand and the silent expansion of Duplex to the UK, Australia and Canada. It also occurs when Google seeks to leverage Duplex to confirm which stores are closed as a result of shelter-in-place requests meant to limit the spread of COVID-19. In a blog post in March, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was increasingly using Duplex “when possible” to contact restaurants and businesses about their hours so they could accurately reflect them.
A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat by email that the launch in Spain is part of that effort and “just to confirm store hours only during the health situation.”
At the end of last year, Google prompted Duplex to select “devices that can access Search or Maps,” expanding its availability beyond select third-party Pixel phones, iOS devices, and Android devices. To be clear, it’s not exactly the Duplex experience that Google demonstrated at its 2018 I / O developer conference in May: In the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Spain, Duplex can’t make restaurant reservations like it can in 48 USA USA state. But it is no longer limited to companies that Google has explicitly partnered with through its Reserve with Google program.
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At the start of an exchange, Duplex makes it clear that the call is automated and that it does not call late at night or early in the morning. In all countries, Duplex informs the person at the other end that they are being recorded. If restaurant owners and front-of-house staff respond “I don’t want to be recorded” or some variation of the phrase, the call is transferred to a human operator on an unregistered line. (Those operators also note the call transcripts used to train the Duplex algorithms.)
Google received a lot of criticism after its initial demo of Duplex in 2018; many did not have fun with the Google Assistant that imitated a human so well. In June of that year, the company promised that Google Assistant using Duplex would be introduced first.
Part of the reason Duplex sounds so natural is because it takes advantage of Google’s sophisticated WaveNet audio processing neural network and cleverly inserts “speech dysfluences”, the “ums” and “ahs” that people unintentionally do in the course of a conversation. These come from a branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, which deals with the language in use and the contexts in which it is used, including things like taking turns in conversation, organization of text, and presupposition.
Still, Google appears to be hedging its bets with the Web Assistant, a relatively new service that uses Duplex technology to handle things like car rental and movie ticket reservations on the mobile web. Web assistant launched in general availability in November 2019, starting with the purchase of movie tickets: Google partnered with more than 70 movie chains and ticket sellers in the US. USA And the UK, including AMC, Fandango, MJR Theaters, Movietickets.com and Odeon.
With the current coronavirus pandemic, the deployment and development of Assistant on the Web and Duplex are likely to slow as governments demand that nonessential companies close their doors.
