Rejoice, folks! Thanks to Google’s new AI helper, you no longer have to talk to people over the phone.

Revealed at Google’s I/O keynote address, CEO Sundar Pichai stunned the audience with the reveal of Google Assistant’s new capability, reports The Verge.

It’s called (imaginatively enough) Google Duplex. While the name’s not all that jaw-dropping, what it does is the real game-changer: it will make phone calls on the behalf of people.

That means no stammering, stuttering and general awkwardness that comes with having to talk to actual people.

How effective is Duplex? Watch how it makes a phone call for a hair appointment (around about the 1:25 mark):

Hallelujah! I don’t know about you, but my anxiety to talk to actual human beings on a phone has been eliminated. Still, if you want to put an end to phone calls when booking an appointment altogether, check out Booksy.

The Verge continues:

Pichai reiterated that this was a real call using Assistant and not some staged demo. “The amazing thing is that Assistant can actually understand the nuances of conversation,” he said. “We’ve been working on this technology for many years.”

The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

Y’all can agree from that video alone that “Lisa’s” voice sounds legit. Even if the annoying American Valley Girl accent is on point.

This is some next-level technology that every phone call-hating individuals needs, but Pichai said that the AI is undergoing a loooot of fine-tuning:

In current testing, Google notes that Duplex successfully completes most conversations and tasks on its own without any intervention from a person on Google’s end. But there are cases where it gets overwhelmed and hands off to a human operator

Google plans to conduct early testing of Duplex inside Assistant this summer.

If only this AI could do all the talking in face-to-face conversations as well.

[source:verge]