Hummus-Based Duplex Inoculation
I’ve been looking for posts about the use of Duplex and they’re rare and hard to find. The most recent is a closed event at Oren’s Hummus is Mountain View where Google team members held a demo of Duplex. At least publicly, there hasn’t been much talk about Duplex since the explosive announcement at I/O in May.
There was a pretty stirring reaction to the Duplex. Is it ethical? Does it have to identify itself to the user? What happens when something goes wrong? Is this the same as robocalls? Can it record the conversation without the recipient’s consent? Is this the robot apocalypse?
From what I recall from I/O, Google was going to slowly start rolling this out and testing it after Veteran’s Day. But there hasn’t been any wide talk by recipients of Duplex calls. Maybe Google is tightly controlling which business will receive calls (like Oren’s)?
Maybe the strategy by Google with the Duplex announcement at I/O was to inoculate the public to this idea so that when it was fully baked, people would be more accepting. This is maybe the same way that Amazon did a slow rollout of the Echo, giving people a chance to freak out about it first, order it, and then spend a few months waiting for it in anticipation.
If we fast forward two years, getting a Google Duplex call to a small business might be the norm. If we fast forward ten years, maybe the need for a call altogether will be mitigated by having enough information to not necessitate a call in the first place?
