First, the people on the receiving end of the call were unaware that the voice speaking into the phone was a machine, meaning Duplex was essentially fooling unsuspecting humans. Second ...

to react the way humans do when speaking on the phone. It’s a reversal of the familiar bot dynamic of a human calling a vendor, like a bank, and having to deal with a computer on the other end.

Of course, this was a phone call with a difference. It wasn’t made by a human, but by the Google Assistant, which did an uncannily good job of asking the right questions, pausing in the right ...

The hot new status symbol in customer service: a phone call with an actual human. There are a lot of ways you might characterize customer-service calls: frustrating, time-consuming, annoying.