THE YCEO: Google Assistant will alert people that Duplex calls are being recorded
The uproar that followed Google’s I/O demonstration of Duplex spanned a range of emotions — from amazement at the technology’s mimicry of casual human speech to deep concern over ethics — and the company has tried to resolve apprehension about Duplex in the days since. Duplex will launch in experimental form this summer and allow consumers to have it call businesses to make restaurant reservations or hair appointments.
On stage at I/O, CEO Sundar Pichai said that Assistant/Duplex would record calls so that users could review the conversation later on to see how things went. But he didn't say whether the recipient would be told about the call being captured. A few days after I/O, Google emphasized that “transparency in the technology is important” and said “we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified.” Now we know that’ll probably be something like a friendly “Hi, this is Google Assistant!” greeting, though it’ll still sound real enough to pass as an actual person. Still creepy?
Over the last week, there has been some skepticism over whether the demonstrations of Duplex on stage and at Google’s blog are in fact real phone calls made to actual businesses. Twitter users seem to have successfully tracked down one restaurant that Google called, with Mashable reporting that employee confirmed it received a call. Bloomberg claims that some of the demo recordings were edited to remove identifying information about the recipients.
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