“Duplex”, which is Google’s AI personal assistant that mimics the voice of a human, is now about to make appointments and book tables through nothing but phone calls. And is now soon set to enter call centres to assist us humans with our queries.

An unnamed insurance company has shown interest in the very recent times in “Duplex” which can manage to handle “simple and repetitive customer calls” until further human intervention is required or if the query gets complicated.

But Google very recently did mention in one of their many statements that they are not intending to test “Duplex” with any of their enterprise clients. They mentioned, “We’re currently focused on consumer use cases for the ‘Duplex’ technology and we aren’t testing ‘Duplex’ with any enterprise clients.”

The company also added, “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”.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai had demonstrated in one of their demos at a conference in May how “Duplex” could book an appointment at a salon and a table at the restaurant using nothing but the integrated AI system into it. Also, in the demo, the Google Assistant did sound more like a human.

To replicate the human speaking patterns, it had used Google DeepMinds’s new “WaveNet” audio-generation technique and also other advanced techniques that were being used in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

And it is not only Google, but even Microsoft has been using a testing the very similar technology in the recent times in China.

In fact, at one of the events in May in London, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had revealed “Xiaoice”, the company’s chatbot has about 500 million “friends” and also more than 16 channels for the Chinese users to interact with it. The interaction mainly happens through popular messaging services such as WeChat.