Google uses people on more than 36 percent of Duplex restaurant reservations

Google uses a human caller in more than 36 percent of Assistant calls using Duplex technology to reserve tables at restaurants. The company says this in response to experiments by The New York Times.

The newspaper tried more than a dozen times to make a reservation through Google Assistant, but succeeded in less than half of the cases. Of the four times Assistant was able to reserve a table, three times it was with the help of a human caller in a call center. It proved difficult for restaurant employees to distinguish human-sounding software from a real person.

According to Google, in a quarter of the cases the call to a restaurant starts with a human person. Of the remaining calls where the software initially calls, a human takes over in another 15 percent of the cases, because Duplex can’t figure it out. As a result, Google has a total of more than 36 percent of Duplex calls handled by a human.

Because Duplex relies so much on human callers, it will be difficult to offer the feature in multiple countries and languages. Assistant always tries to make reservations online first and to check whether restaurants take reservations by phone. The software decides whether a person should call based on various factors, such as when Google is afraid that restaurants mistake Duplex for a spam caller.

Google announced Duplex Assistant feature on I/O last year and began offering the service in US cities on Pixel phones last fall. The service now works in more US states and on more smartphones than during its release.