[013a]

This is only one small part of the article, but: I think the revolution in Duplex isn't about letting customers use it to schedule appointments and stuff. I think its much more significant from the perspective of using it as a way to improve Google's data for themselves. They mentioned they're going to use it soon to improve the accuracy of their business open/close times. Imagine other applications; asking businesses how busy it is right now, confirming road closures with municipal governments, etc.

Also imagine it opened up on Google Cloud, in a product similar to AWS Connect.

Finally, imagine this: They've always had a huge amount of data for human voices to train their AI models. Here's one more; being able to call anyone on the planet and get them talking in a way that is natural, then using the data on the other end of the phone to further train the accuracy of the voices they use. Kind of like ReCaptcha, but for voices.

[zrobotics]

Great, so Google can get even more data. Huzzah!? Why is that a good thing, and what benefit does it provide to consumers? The only thing you mentioned that has even marginal benefit to the public is better search data, and I get less and less convinced that this will happen. I may be an outlier, but I have found Google search less useful in the past year, unless I go through steps to avoid personalization. Rather than search the part # that I requested, it just thinks I want to go to digikey.

And dear God, spam calls are already bad enough, why do we want to make them even more realistic? I fail to see even one application where I would prefer to talk to a more realistic robot.