In one of the more amazing demos I’ve seen lately at a tech keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai just showed video of the Google Assistant making two phone calls to businesses. In one, it scheduled a haircut appointment; in the other, it tried to make a restaurant reservation, then learned that the place in question only took them for parties of five or more (but that one probably wasn’t necessary).
The Assistant talked, listened, and figured things out, and if the people on the other end caught on that they were speaking a computer, they didn’t mention it. Pichai said that Google wants to develop this feature further before fully rolling it out—but that it plans to use the technology soon to call local businesses and ask about their hours, in hopes of capturing and sharing that information and thereby saving the businesses time in the future.
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