Google’s Duplex phone call-making AI needs to identify itself

One of the attention grabbing announcements at this year’s Google I/O is Duplex, an artificial intelligence service that will make calls for you when you want to do things like setup an appointment for a haircut or asking about a business’ operating hours. The demo at the conference showed two replayed calls with small business employees that don’t seem to have caught on they were talking to a bot. As explained on Google’s blog post about the technology, the company is trying to make the technology sound natural. But it doesn’t address the issue of disclosure or whether it’ll alert those on the other end of the line that they are talking to a bot.

Fast Company reached out to Google and the company repeated part of the blog post saying: “It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.” And when they wanted to further clarify that the Duplex will identify itself as a bot, the representative reiterated the last sentence so we have to wait and see what Google does with the technology and that they remain aware of the implications or any issues that may arise with this new tech it’s introducing.