Voice assistants handling phone calls have gained wider acceptance since the early days of Duplex. Call screening is now commonplace across Pixel, Samsung, and iPhone devices, with onboard assistants routinely intercepting unknown callers to inquire about their purpose.
However, these features—much like highly touted AI translation tools—often fall short in practice. Calls are inherently unpredictable; recipients may hang up, mistaking the assistant for spam. Complications arise if the AI struggles with accents, potentially trapping callers in repetitive loops, or if a business lacks a requested item—will the bot exit gracefully or simply disconnect?
“That is exactly what we want to continue testing,” a Google spokesperson stated. “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.” Google confirms Gemini will “politely” end the call if a business cannot meet the user’s needs.
This signals a future where AI may completely manage business phone interactions. Businesses are also adopting AI for customer interactions, such as the California pizza chain Pizza My Heart, which uses its “Jimmy the Surfer” chatbot for text-based orders.
A scenario where a user’s phone AI calls a restaurant, only to be answered by the restaurant’s AI, seems increasingly plausible. The machines would essentially be negotiating details—like whether you want stuffed crust—on your behalf.
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