• Duplex Google's artificial intelligence speaks on the phone like a person
  • Meet.Google also offers your video calls (up to 100 people and no time limit)
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Spanish businesses could receive an artificial intelligence phone call in the coming weeks. On the other end of the line, when they go off-hook, the voice of Google Duplex will sound, a software capable of realistically conversing on the phone with humans , even imitating some of the common crutches and pauses of natural speech.

First announced in 2018, this assistant promised to impersonate humans for common tasks that still require speaking in person on the phone, such as making a reservation at a restaurant or beauty salon that does not have a computerized system. The assistant is not only able to have a conversation with the person on the other end of the line, but can negotiate and agree hours depending on the calendar of the user interested in the reservation, looking for gaps in his agenda if the original appointment he wanted did not were available.

Google has ended up rolling out a somewhat more limited version , in part due to concerns that emerged after the demonstration of a call during the inaugural conference of the Google IO developer fair. Several experts and academics then pointed out that trying to hide the digital origin of this assistant was dishonest and posed ethical dilemmas .

The search engine has ended up implementing a system that advertises itself as a digital assistant (it does not try to impersonate a human being) and that at first is intended for a simpler task: checking the opening hours of the different businesses . Although Google maps include information on schedules in different stores, this information is not always reliable, especially on partial holidays or that only affect certain regions.

In the US, Duplex has spent several months contacting different businesses and asking if they are open and during what hours to update information on Google Maps. That is the same function that it will now do in Spain and in Spanish.

The system is not fully automated. Since Google is still teaching Duplex to have conversations as if it were a human, part of the calls are also made by flesh and blood people. If there is a problem with one of the automated calls, an operator can also take charge of the conversation.

Google will use this system to determine the opening hours of the different shops during the de-escalation phases of the quarantine period, which begins this week.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • Artificial intelligence

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