No, Google isn’t letting call centres use its human sounding Duplex AI

Google says its Duplex AI is aimed at helping “people get things done.”

Google’s controversial human-sounding AI uses DeepMind’s new advanced “WaveNet” audio-generation technique (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the company's annual I/O developer conference earlier this year shocked everyone with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that mimicked human voice and even made appointments and book tables through phone calls. A report earlier this week claimed that the AI may soon enter call centres assisting humans with customer queries - a move that could have cost millions of jobs. But Google has made it clear it's not testing its AI for enterprise clients.

"We're currently focused on consumer use cases for the Duplex technology where we can help people get things done, rather than applying it to potential enterprise use cases," a Google spokesperson told CNET.

"We aren't testing Duplex with any enterprise clients. Duplex is designed to operate in very specific use cases, and currently we're focused on testing with restaurant reservations, hair salon booking, and holiday hours with a limited set of trusted testers. It's important that we get the experience right, and we're taking a slow and measured approach as we incorporate learnings and feedback from our tests."

Earlier, a report in The Information late on Thursday, an unnamed insurance company has shown interest in "Duplex" which could "handle simple and repetitive customer calls" before taking help from a human if the conversation gets complicated. WATCH: The Google Duplex is here, but how does it work?

Google's controversial human-sounding AI uses DeepMind's new advanced "WaveNet" audio-generation technique and other technologies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to replicate human speech patterns.

However, tech critics raised questions on the morality of the technology, saying it was developed without proper oversight or regulation.

Microsoft has showcased a similar technology it has been testing in China. At an AI event in London in May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company's "Xiaoice" social chat bot has 500 million "friends" and more than 16 channels for Chinese users to interact with it through WeChat and other popular messaging services.

"Xiaoice" interacts in text conversations but now the company has started allowing the chat bot to call people on their phones.

(With inputs from HT Correspondent)