Businesses skeptical of Google’s robocalls
Company will begin testing app that will call for reservations, appointments
Google has its robot work cut out for it. Janell Goplen automatically hangs up the phone when she receives automated calls to her Clearwater restaurant in Newport, Oregon.
In the summer, Google will begin testing its controversial new plan to have the Google Assistant smartphone app make human-sounding calls for restaurant reservations and hair-cut appointments. If Goplen were to get the call and she sensed that it was robotic, “I’d hang up,” she says. “Google would have to let me know this was a Google reservation.”
In a demo this week, the technology called Duplex wowed the crowd at Google’s annual I/O conference with recordings of actual conversations between a bot and the person taking the reservation. The Google Assistant making the calls sounded eerily human, complete with “umms,” “ands” and appropriate follow-ups.
But what Google didn’t do in the demo is to tell the person on the other end that he or she was speaking to a robot. And when pressed for clarification Wednesday about whether it would do so in the tests, Google declined to answer, sending USA TODAY to the corporate blog, where it said “transparency” was important to the company.
In the aftermath of the demo, many questions arose. Consumers bitterly complain about robocalls, which are rising despite regulatory vows to stop them. Doesn’t Duplex promise to usher in even more of them, albeit ones that can work for you?
Consumers are also increasingly aware of how much data tech companies collect. Doesn’t this open the door to malevolent uses of the technology?
Google’s technology is “a massive Christmas present to robocallers,” said Alex Quilici, CEO of the app YouMail, which promises to cut down on robocalls.
Everywhere there is technology for good, there’s technology for bad, he notes, and if Google could figure out how to do it, so could rogues. “Who needs a call center anymore, if you can use technology to call millions of people at a low cost, without human involvement?” he asks.
Then there are the practical hurdles. “When people call us, we ask them where they want to sit, inside, outside or upstairs,” says Goplen. “We ask if they mind climbing the stairs. We ask if it’s a special occasion, if they know where our parking lot is.”
Google says Duplex “is capable of carrying out sophisticated conversations and it completes the majority of its tasks fully autonomously.” But when faced with a conversation the bot can’t handle, Google says it will default to a human operator.
Google says Duplex will be tested only in the United States, but wouldn’t specify where they would be.
Bret Kinsella, the publisher of the Voicebot.ai website, expects even if businesses are initially opposed to Duplex, they’ll come around. “If they start to lose business because they’re not accepting Google reservations, it would be in their interest to start taking them.”
Madeleine Eller is ready. As a consumer, “I want to talk on the phone as little as possible. I don’t want to be put on hold, or go over the details of the order. I just want to click a button,” she says.
She also runs Tulsa-area restaurants. So even though she thinks the idea of robot reservations is “weird,” she understands.