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by jessehu 2914 days ago
I’m rather confused why doing this as a consumer product in Assistant makes more sense than an enterprise product. There is so much room for improvement in call centers, and would be a huge market opportunity.

This is hardly even a time saver. What would be helpful is if this is also able to stay on hold for you — probably an easy task.
5 comments
vatueil 2913 days ago
In Ars Technica's article Nick Fox, VP of product design for Google Assistant, said:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-cal...

> Fox didn't rule out selling this kind of tech to call centers, but that's another potential down-the-road addition. "There are companies that do that well," he said. "There are very big and established companies that provide software for call centers. It's not the core of our business. We'll see as we go whether we think if we can help there. But it's not a business that we're in today, and it's a pretty well-served business."

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ufmace 2914 days ago
Do you mean a call center bot on the answer side? I would think that's massively harder to do in a way that's noticeably better then the phone tree systems that already exist. Everything simple is already covered by simpler automated systems, and everything that isn't simple is impossibly hard for this level of tech.

Now if Google could make a bot that can call the service line for a company, jump through whatever hoops are needed to get a person on the phone, then ring the call through to me when they got one, that I would pay money for.

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indecisive_user 2914 days ago
As an enterprise product, Google would require all audio be sent to their servers, which I'm guessing most businesses would not be too keen on doing.
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SirYandi 2914 days ago
Enterprises are more demanding and have a lower tolerance for error. I have no doubt Duplex will be rolled out to enterprise once the technology is ready and has been thoroughly tested on consumers.
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richardw 2914 days ago
Probably because it's far less risky to mess up a dinner order than trash the good name of a company.

But once it's working, they'll be coming for the call center jobs...

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