The Atlantic

Service Workers Forced to Act Like Robots Meet Their Match

Surprise! It’s a robot that pretends to be human, courtesy of Google.
Source: Christian Hartmann / Reuters

On Tuesday, Google showed off Duplex, a new service the company is testing that allows Google Assistant to call establishments on a user’s behalf to make a dinner reservation or schedule a haircut. The voice synthesis in these calls is jaw-dropping:

With a few millisecond mistakes, Duplex sounds like a human, complete with mmms and uhhs and cheery colloquialisms. The ability of the AI to respond to real, messy language and unexpected sequences is also incredible. Generating conversational human sentences in real time can probably be considered a “solved problem,” as people around here like to say.

The audio suggests that computer voices just skipped right pastand it turns out robots won’t sound like

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