Google Duplex: See what's happening with the Voice Assistant launch

GThe long awaited oogle next generation voice wizard may already be on your phone. The Duplex upgrade, which should give Google Assistant the ability to call restaurants and salons to schedule appointments with an extremely human voice, is in the process of a silent presentation.

Reverse it was possible to access Duplex's restaurant booking capabilities in a New York City Pixel 3, but we are part of a lucky group of selected users. Google confirmed for VentureBeat on November 21, the update will be available to Pixel users exclusively in Atlanta, New York, Phoenix and San Francisco.

As it stands, the Duplex is halfway to the view outlined by CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I / O conference in March. When we tried, we only booked restaurants, while requests to make a hair appointment yielded only search results.

There is another warning as well. Duplex also only call a restaurant if it no longer uses a reservation service such as OpenTable or Resy. The service also does not seem to (yet) prepare a transcript of the interaction between the Assistant and the restaurant for you to see afterwards.

But the wizard seems to have the ability to jot down the details of when, where and how many people you need a reservation, and the Wizard will ping you with a notification to warn you if you have booked a table successfully. Duplex says it takes about 15 minutes to make the reservation, but when we tried, we were able to confirm our reservation within five.

Google started testing the Duplex in early summer in partnership with a small group of companies in the United States. During a live demo of the software, Reverse I have to speak to the Duplex from the restaurant's point of view.

At that point, A.I. had developed voice tics, such as "uhhs" and "umms" that fill human speech. Because of how human it looks like company executives said Reverse that Duplex would be announcing itself as a robot to prevent anyone from believing that they were talking to a person.

However, a VentureBeat video revealed that Duplex failed to advertise itself as a bot during a test phone call. The Verge reported that this happened during this phone call because the Duplex was being run by humans instead of autonomously speaking.