Google's automatic booking service, Duplex, has been deployed almost everywhere in the United States (with the exception of Kentucky and Louisiana) after being made available to users as a limited test after Google I / O announcement last year. Over time, the company has received both reviews and praise, and it was certainly very interesting to see the service grow. In a tentative conclusion, Google said that currently about 25% of calls made through the Duplex service are actually managed by humans and that in about 15% of robotic calls, a human needs to intervene at some point .

The New York Times has tested Duplex in collaboration with two restaurants and Google. The journalists worked on their study for a few days and recorded more than a dozen bookings. Of these, only four were successful and three of them were not conducted by AI Duplex, but by an employee. Still, the New York Times has managed to record this automated call (you can check it in the article), and this sounds odd. If the caller had not announced himself as a robot, I would not have been able to distinguish the voice from a real voice.

Speaking to Google, the magazine also discovered that all of Google's calls were supervised by employees and that they could take precedence over the conversation whenever they deemed it necessary. Thus, the service is still in active development and not the automated service under which the company has announced it.

While Duplex is becoming increasingly available in the United States, it's good to see that it's progressing, even though it's clear that there's still a long way to go before becoming the system of automatic booking promised by Google. In the meantime, the company is already focusing on the next major issue for Duplex: it wants the service to automatically fill web forms for items such as rental cars or movie tickets, depending on your preferences.