Google Just Stepped Up Their Digital Assistant Big Time [VIDEO]

Google just dropped a huge bombshell about their digital assistant, announcing it can now make calls for you, and it’s a little creepy.

By DAVID on May 22, 2018
(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

This is groundbreaking, amazing, and a little scary. Google’s digital assistant was just given a sort of major update (still being tested, not released yet). The digital assistant can actually make phone calls for you, and book appointments. Now, it’s not going to call your mom and have a conversation with her or anything like that. It’s simply designed to make the simple, mundane calls that everyone hates having to do. Booking haircuts, restaurant reservations, stuff like that.

See also: Google made their GPS app more human-like.

Google had a tech presentation a couple weeks ago in which they demonstrated the new tech. They’re calling it Google Duplex, and it’s an extension of the digital assistant. If you have a Google phone, you know it as “OK Google.” While it’s not entirely clear how the assistant knows who to call, the fact that it can make calls at all is scary. Just imagine if you said something along the lines of “Boy, I’d like to tell my boss where to stick it,” and the assistant called your boss. Anyway, that’s probably far-fetched, but these calls that Google played sound a little too real. Here’s their demo from Google CEO Sundar Pichai:

Now, the calls were obviously edited to hide the names of the business, and this website suspects there were even more edits besides that, but the point is that the Google Assistant actually can have a conversation. On the phone. With other people besides you. And that’s really frightening, though really, REALLY cool at the same time. We’re in modern times here, folks. Personal assistant robots have been science fiction ideas for years, and now they’re here in our phones. Check out some more info on Google Duplex here.

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