Google’s human-like phone calls are a clever but nasty trick

Get ready to spend your life talking to a robot. Yesterday, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated a technology called Google Duplex, which can make phone calls on behalf of users – and sounds like a real human.

He played two examples in which the system made an appointment for a haircut and phoned a restaurant to make a reservation. Unlike the robotic phone calls we are all used to, Duplex does an uncanny impression of human speech, complete with ums and ahs and well-timed pauses in the conversation. It…