The rise of the personal digital agency
Yesterday 8th May 2018, Google stunned an audience well accustomed to new technological innovation by unveiling their google assistant making a call to a human, on behalf of the user, to book an appointment with a hairdresser.
The human on the other side of the phone call was non-the-wiser that she was talking to a machine that was indistinguishable from a human, be it by the pitch and inflections of its voice, the mannerisms we all exhibit like the humms and ahhh we all include whilst we think of an answer to a question.
Many are questioning how ethical this is that the human on the line was not aware she was talking to a machine, and that is a valid question, but only because it was so goddam impossible to detect.
We all are faced with this almost every single day. Not a day passes by that I don’t get a call from some automated system saying:
“Hi, I heard you have been involved in an accident that was not your fault!”
That machine did not identify itself as a machine either… but anyone could recognise it in the first 2 seconds of the call. What makes this a watershed moment is that the machine is now truly useful and not only a gimmick to eventually transfer you to a human that will try and sell you something you don’t need or want.
The BBC has today published a piece talking about this:
The author, almost as an afterthought, ends the article saying:
Or maybe, the salon could get an AI assistant of its own. And then it’s AI talking to AI. Booking appointments. Planning. Plotting. Waiting.
And maybe, without noticing, he has hit the nail on the head…
The reason google demonstrated the ability of their assistant to call the hairdressers is because the majority of small businesses do not have an automatic booking system or even webpages in many cases…What if google releases a simple device that connects to businesses phone lines and acts as their assistant reversing the direction of the Human -AI interaction ? In this case, every one calling that business (human or AI) is talking to a believable and proficient AI assistant, able to schedule bookings on behalf of the small business owner. Moreover, google can make it so that the business assistant can recognise when another AI assistant is calling and dispense with the niceties of social conversation and interaction and talk “computer” to each other finding the optimal time to suit the business and the client in a second instead of minutes of human voice interaction.
And guess what… that business assistant does not work from 9–5. This will enable small businesses to schedule customer appointments 24/7 365 days a year for the capital expenditure of a device and maybe a small subscription fee.
This was google’s “tour-de-force”, showing just how far ahead they are in AI compared to everyone else on the planet. It is an “iPhone-like” reveal moment and every other player in the market should now be analysing and reevaluating their own research and product pipelines … because google just delivered true useful and usable digital agency whilst Siri is still in the dark ages, cracking jokes to only iPhone users, Amazon, is still trying to put a sales women (Alexa) in your living room and Cortana… What is Cortana doing again? Besides occasionally telling you the weather (if you happen to be sitting on a windows 10 PC).
