One of the fascinating things that Google showed off during Google I/O was their advancement in AI, where they unveiled a new system called Duplex that could make calls of behalf of the user and speak to human beings and respond naturally. So much so that it did not sound artificial at all and where Google even included “brain farts” during its conversation that made it sound scarily natural.
While no doubt that Google’s advancement in AI is extremely impressive, there were also concerns about the ethics of AI, to which Google has since responded to. In a statement made to The Verge, a Google spokesperson said, “We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex — as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important.”
“We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product.” This echoes a blog post written by engineers Yaniv Leviathan and Yossi Matias.
In the post, the engineers notes that “it’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that,” and that “we want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context.” At the moment Duplex isn’t a commercially available product, but Google does have plans to start testing Duplex with Assistant later this year.
In the meantime if you’re hearing about Duplex for the first time, you can check out Mashable’s video above which shows the tech in action.