More on that Google phone call that rocked the world. I'm Rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily at Google Io. Google made a phone call that got quite the reaction. It was Google assistant calling a hair salon to make an appointment. Take a listen.
So happening out here. Hi, I'm calling to book a women's haircut for a client. I'm looking for something on May third. Sure I give me one second?
Mm hmm.
Sure? What time are you looking for a round at twelve pm? We do not have a twelve pm available. The closest we have to that is a one fifteen. Do you have anything between ten am and twelve pm? Depending on what service she would like? What service is she looking for? Just a woman's haircut for now? Okay, we have a ton of can I am a fine? Okay? What's your birth name? The first name is Lisa. Okay, perfect, So I will see Lisa at ten o'clock on May third. Okay, great, thanks, great,
have a great day. Back.
Yes, that's artificial intelligence at work, a computer calling a real person and doing all the back and forth to set up an appointment. That are even the hums and mms. The project is called Google Duplex. My post on Twitter got lots of reactions. Luis Claudio Costa said, Siri, You're fired. Dylan Robertson said it's so realistic that I thought it was some kind of prank video. Mind blown, and Gregory Dyke said last time I was impressed that much was
when the first iPhone was presented. Wow. Now you can draw your own conclusions whether you think this is the best technology in the world or kind of scary. But after the io QINOT I got to talk to Rishi Chandra, who obviously is very excited about this. He's the vice president of Product Management and general manager of Home Products.
Again, it's about connecting your goals and intent with the businesses that actually can fill those intents. So when I want to order flowers or book a restaurant or what have you, we want to make it as easy as possible, and today it's not that easy. And so by connecting kind of consumers with businesses, we think we can help both people. Right, businesses have more customers coming in and consumers have easier access to all the great available technology or services around them.
Rischie explained how Duplex can help with all those businesses out there that aren't on Open Table or a similar online booking platform.
I think one of the big insights we found is that not every business today is digitally connected right. In fact, the vast majority are still not digitally connected, and so how do you reach them? How do we help you assist you in ways of getting haircut appointments or booking a restaurant reservation. And so the insight was, well, look, everyone has phones today, and how do we make it so that ORAI can help you kind of take advantage of assisting you using the phone. But it's still really
early technology. But some of the examples you saw is how quickly it's advanced. The ability for the assistant to really react and be able to have a natural conversation so on is something a few years ago we never thought possible. But we're at that forefront now and so we're excited to experiment with this. We're going to launch it as an experiment next few weeks and we'll see
how it goes. But I think we believe we are actually the beginning of something much bigger where we can assist you in so many different ways that we could in before.
One of the big questions, will the person at the business who's answering the phone know that they're talking to a computer.
One of the things we want to do is make sure we're being very transparent obviously with the businesses, and so we're actually experiment with the different ways of saying that you'll see actually in the keynote they said, Hey, I'm calling on behalf of this person. I'm a client of behalf that person. That's just one example. There's multiple
examples of things we're actually testing out and trying. This is a whole purpose of the experiment to make sure that everyone feels that we are being fully transparent and that even the restaurants feel it and they understand what's actually happening. And restaurants of course will also be able to opt out if they're not uncomfortable technology for whatever reason.
Google also announced six new voices for Google Insistent, including a celebrity voice.
Now.
The reason for this it's easier than ever for their computers to synthesize voices.
Generally, what we've done is you need a seed, so you have kind of a set of voices that are scripted, and then based off that we can start programming and so they can almost say anything, which is great because obviously the assistant can respond in so many different ways or to be Google Search responses or Google Maps responses. And what we've done is we've trained a bunch of neural nets that actually allow us to build custom voices in a pretty seamless way, and we can actually have
a wide diversity. Right Why should assistant only have one voice? And one of the most exciting things we are talking about today is that John Legend actually is gonna be one of those seeded voices, and so you're gonna have John Legend actually talk to you. We're actually pretty excited to get that out the door. So the six voices are going to launch today, and then John Legend will actually launch later this year.
And by the way, if you want to change your Google Assistant Voice right now, just go into Google Assistant, then Preferences, then Assistant Voice, and you've got eight voices to choose from. Have fun. Speaking of Assistant, Google also announced a feature called pretty Please, which is helpful for kids.
You know, it's been one of the top feature requests. I think even my wife notices, you know when one of the things that kids love about the product is that they for the first time they're in charge. They get to tell a device what to do. But of course one of the things we want to train you kids on is how to do it in an appropriate way.
And so the pretty Preeace feature is a way that we can get positive reinforcement to kids who actually say please or thank you when they're actually interacting with the assistant. We think it's an another mechanism that we can help make sure that we're having technology really work in people's lives, and that enhances kind of the kids' experience with the product.
There you have it, robocalls two point zero, but this time they might actually be kind of useful. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast and leaving those ratings and reviews in the Apple podcast sapp like Airwaves seventy five, who said this is an awesome podcast that keeps me up to date in the tech world. Rich Demiro does an exceptional job bringing that information to the listeners. Highly recommended.
Thanks so much, Airwaves seventy five. And if you leave a review, I might just read it right here on the show. I'm Rich Damiro links to everything I talk about here on my website. Just go to richontech dot tv. I'll talk to you real soon.