Google introduced its artificial intelligence (AI) based voice assistant at its annual developers conference – Google I/O – last year. At the time, the tech giant demonstrated how Duplex could make reservations and even have a chat with real people over a phone call. The tech giant piloted the program in select states in the US last year expanding it to a total of 48 states in the country. Now over a year and half after its initial roll out, the company has finally begun launching the Google Duplex in other parts of the world.
And the first country beyond the US where the Mountain View, California based tech giant would be rolling out Duplex is New Zealand.
This news was confirmed by Google over its New Zealand-based blog post. “Starting this week, we’ll start a pilot to confirm holiday hours for a small number of local businesses in New Zealand with the help of the Google Duplex technology,” Google’s VP of Engineering, Scott Huffman wrote in the blog post.
Starting October 28, some businesses in New Zealand will receive an automated call from Google asking to confirm their hours for the upcoming Labour Day public holiday. Once the pilot group confirms their timings, this information will be updated on to Google Maps and Search for anyone searching for the business info for the holiday, which in turn would not only make it easier for the users to look specific stuff during the holiday rush but also for the businesses by bringing in more consumers.
Google in its blog post confirmed that it would disclose that the business is speaking with an automated system – Google Duplex — when making a call.
The company in its blog post also said that businesses can also opt-out of receiving calls from Google. Businesses can either tell the company over the phone – presumably in the form of feedback or during/after an ongoing call — or change their settings in Google My Business section of their Google accounts.
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