Voice assistants handling phone calls is a little more accepted today than back in the Duplex days. Call screening features abound—whether on a Pixel, Samsung, or iPhone, onboard assistants routinely intercept unknown callers to ask why they’re calling.
But these kinds of features—much like hyped-up AI translation features—can often fall short. Calls are unpredictable, and the person on the other end may hang up, assuming it’s just another spam call. What happens if Gemini doesn’t understand a person’s accent all that well? Will it trap the clerk in an endless loop of asking them to repeat themselves? And if the shop doesn’t have the tool you need, does the bot know how to bow out politely—or just cut the line?
“That is exactly what we want to continue testing,” the Google spokesperson says. “With this experiment, we look forward to users testing a variety of cases, so that we can continue to improve the feature across accents and noisy environments.” And yes, Google says Gemini will “politely” hang up if the business can’t accommodate your needs.
It still points to a future where robots may take over these kinds of business phone calls altogether. Businesses are also experimenting with artificial-intelligence tools to interface with customers, like local California pizza chain Pizza My Heart, which lets you text its Jimmy the Surfer chatbot to order pizza.
It doesn’t seem too far off that you’ll ask your phone to call a restaurant, and the restaurant’s AI will answer. The machines are talking to each other, except they’re just debating whether you want the stuffed crust.