Google today announced plans to bring its "Duplex" feature that's designed to book restaurant reservations for you through actual voice calls to iOS devices.
Google says that the feature is available on all Pixel phones in 43 U.S. states and that it will be coming to "more Android and iOS devices" over the course of the next few weeks.
Unveiled at the 2018 Google I/O developer conference, Google Duplex lets Google Assistant make calls to businesses to schedule appointments and make restaurant reservations. It was demoed on stage with Google Assistant making a phone call to a real salon and using a natural-sounding conversation to book an appointment.
Following the demo, there were questions about the ethics of having a machine phone a real person, but in response, Google said that Google Assistant will identify itself and will allow restaurants to opt out of being recorded.
Placing a restaurant reservation this way involves telling Google Assistant where you want to go, what time, and with how many people. Google Assistant then calls the restaurant, and once a reservation is made successfully, you're notified via email and calendar invite.
Top Rated Comments
If they can bring this feature to iOS, I would be a very happy camper. But if Google continues to make strides in their digital assistant technology, while Apple is still stale, then I may finally switch back to Google’s ecosystem.
Of course, here it will be called 'Maisonette'.
Look at the graphics API fiasco. Apple could have supported Vulkan, an open standard graphics API created by Khronos Group, which Apple themselves was a member of. But no, they not only deprecated OpenGL support at 4.1 (very outdated), but they intentionally omitted Vulkan support and now force developers to use Metal 2, which is 100% proprietary. They don’t care about consumers or developers; they just want control.