• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

Google Duplex now speaks Spanish, starts calling businesses in Spain to update hours

April 30, 2020   Big Data
 Google Duplex now speaks Spanish, starts calling businesses in Spain to update hours

Google today launched Google Duplex, its AI chat agent that can arrange appointments over the phone, in Spain to automate the updating of business hours across Google Search and Google Maps. For the first time, it’s speaking in Spanish — Duplex previously only spoke in English.

The expansion follows a pilot in New New Zealand and Duplex’s quiet expansion to the U.K., Australia, and Canada. It also comes as Google looks to leverage Duplex to confirm which stores are closed as a result of shelter-in-place orders intended to limit the spread of COVID-19. In a March blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was increasingly using Duplex “where possible” to contact restaurants and businesses about their hours so it can reflect them accurately.

A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat via email that the Spain rollout is part of that effort and “only for confirming store hours only during the health situation.”

Late last year, Google brought Duplex to select “devices that can access Search or Maps,” expanding its availability beyond Pixel phones, iOS devices, and select third-party Android devices. To be clear, it’s not quite the Duplex experience Google demoed at its I/O 2018 developers conference in May — in the U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Spain, Duplex can’t make restaurant reservations as it can in 48 U.S. states. But it’s no longer limited to businesses Google has explicitly partnered with through its Reserve with Google program.

VB Transform 2020 Online – Live July 15-17, 2020: Join leading AI executives at VentureBeat’s AI event of the year. Register today and save 30% off digital access passes.

At the beginning of an exchange, Duplex makes it clear that the call is automated, and it doesn’t call late at night or early in the morning. In all countries, Duplex informs the person on the other end that they’re being recorded. If restaurant owners and front of house staff respond with “I don’t want to be recorded” or some variation of the phrase, the call is handed off to a human operator on an unrecorded line. (Those operators also annotate the call transcripts used to train Duplex’s algorithms.)

Google received a ton of criticism after its initial Duplex demo in 2018 — many were not amused by Google Assistant mimicking a human so well. In June of that year, the company promised that Google Assistant using Duplex would first introduce itself.

Part of the reason Duplex sounds so natural is because it taps Google’s sophisticated WaveNet audio processing neural network and intelligently inserts “speech disfluencies” — the “ums” and “ahs” people make involuntarily in the course of a conversation. These come from a branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, which deals with language in use and the contexts in which it is used — including things like taking turns in conversation, text organization, and presupposition.

Still, Google appears to be hedging its bets with Assistant on the Web, a relatively new service that uses Duplex technology to handle things like car rentals and movie ticket bookings on the mobile web. Assistant on the Web launched in general availability in November 2019, starting with movie ticket purchasing — Google partnered with over 70 cinema chains and ticket sellers in the U.S. and U.K., including  AMC, Fandango, MJR Theaters, Movietickets.com, and Odeon.

With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, rollouts and development of Assistant on the Web and Duplex are likely to slow as governments mandate that non-essential businesses shut their doors.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Businesses, Calling, Duplex, Google, HOURS, Spain, Spanish, Speaks, starts, Update
  • Recent Posts

    • Search SQL Server error log files
    • We were upgraded to the Unified Interface for Dynamics 365. Now What?
    • Recreating Art – the unexpected way
    • Upcoming Webinar: Using Dynamics 365 to Empower your Marketing and Sales Teams with Digital Automation
    • Center for Applied Data Ethics suggests treating AI like a bureaucracy
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited