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Smart assistants are all the rage these days with Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant being two of the most popular options for a variety of devices. Recently, the search engine company unveiled a capability that basically allowed its smart assistant to book appointments via audio calls that almost seamlessly emulated the way humans speak. This puts the company one step closer to creating the perfect assistant.
Being able to tell a smartphone to book an appointment with a hair salon or a restaurant or with a doctor’s clinic so that they don’t have to is a dream for a lot of people. It would certainly remove what many consider to be a hassle and gives users the feeling like they have their own genuine personal assistant. This is exactly the kind of possibility shown during the I/O conference, Reuters reports.
At the event, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed off an example of the Google Assistant speaking to actual people to book appointments at a salon and at a restaurant. By all accounts, the assistant spoke almost like a genuine human, with only a few hints that the speaker was even a machine. If the listener didn’t know that they were talking to an AI, they would likely never have suspected as much.
It’s even more impressive in the case of the restaurant booking since the person who answered the call didn’t exactly have a perfect American-English accent. In fact, to a human listener, speaking to such a person would have been disconcerting and would have likely involved several requests to repeat the restaurant representative’s questions.
As technological achievements go, this is incredibly impressive. However, as Gizmodo notes, the concept is also quite terrifying to some.
With tech companies seemingly intent on pursuing this idea of having machines perfectly emulating humans in every way, it brings the moral arguments of enslavement to the foreground even more. Many are of the opinion that what Google has done and is still trying to do can simply be considered repugnant from a moral standpoint.
