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December 14, 2021 by Sophia Ofer
Artificial intelligence has been increasingly integrated into our everyday lives. I’ve recently become more familiar with Google’s AI booking service “Duplex”. Duplex calls up businesses to reserve spots at a restaurant, get tickets, sign up for fitness classes, or book salon appointments. As a hair salon receptionist, I often receive Google’s automated calls booking appointments. Once I had to tell Duplex that an appointment was not available. The program was able to respond by saying it will notify the customer and call me back. I left that interaction extremely confused. I wanted to know more about how Duplex works.
To use the service, you search up the given business, click make a reservation and type in the selected information. Once giving your information Duplex calls the restaurant and handles the rest of the process for you.
The first thing that struck me was how human these artificial calls sounded. The only reason I knew it was AI is that as you answer the phone Duplex states “I’m Google’s automated booking service, so I’ll record the call”. During calls, the voice pauses and uses “uhh” or “um” to sound more human-like. The disfluencies in the speech were added because they increased the call's success rate. Despite stating that it is automated, sounding too robotic made whoever was receiving the call more likely to hang up. This surprised me because I personally find it more unsettling that the voice is so human-like after announcing that it is AI. If a call fails and the recipient hangs up, it can be transferred to a person in Google’s call center.
Duplex uses speech recognition, similar to technology like Siri that we use on a daily basis. This type of hands-free technology is used for its time-saving advantages. These devices use language-learning mechanisms to understand different languages, accents, and dialects. A microphone transmits the user's voice into a wavelike electrical signal and is turned into a digital signal by the system's hardware. The digital signal is analyzed by each unit of sound (phonemes), allowing for words to be reconstructed and distinguished.
From the user's perspective, I find Duplex useful and very easy to use. I have used the feature before to make reservations, but never gave thought to the business. I was very surprised at the number of calls we get from Google automated booking. Personally, it is not my favorite because if we do not have the reservation available or they are looking for a service other than a haircut then the reservation can’t be completed. Hopefully Duplex will continue to improve upon the AI.
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