Google Assistant’s Duplex will call businesses for you

Google Assistant’s Duplex will call businesses for you to set up appointments

Google Assistant is pretty great already, but there are some things you need an actual human for. Not every business has an online booking system, so in some cases, you have to talk to an actual person to make a reservation. Google’s solution for this is ‘Duplex,’ which will allow Assistant to actually call a business for you to set up an appointment or reservation.

Google Duplex is the technology behind a new Google Assistant feature. Duplex is a completely automated system that places calls on your behalf, complete with a natural-sounding human voice instead of a robotic one.

Furthermore, Duplex is able to understand “complex sentences, fast speech and long remarks” according to Google.

For those looking to dig into the geekier side of how Google Duplex works, check out this post, complete with a handful of recorded call samples.

When Google Duplex is made available in beta this summer, you can use it to complete three tasks: schedule a hair appointment, make reservations at a restaurant and get holiday hours of a business.

If the business you’ve asked Google Assistant to book an appointment with accepts online reservations, Assistant will use that to complete the task. Otherwise, Assistant/Duplex will call the business on your behalf.

watch the Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018