With Duplex, Google can book your ticket automatically knowing your preferences. Making life simple!
SUNDAR PICHAI, CEO AT GOOGLE: Duplex enables Google Assistant to make restaurant reservations on your behalf by actually placing a call. It’s now available in 44 states across the U.S. and we’ve got a great feedback not only from our users but from businesses as well.
For us Duplex is the approach by which we train AI on simple but familiar tasks to accomplish them and save you time. Duplex was launched with restaurant reservations on the phone but now we are moving beyond voice and extending Duplex to tasks on the bat.
We again want to focus on narrow use cases to start so we are looking at rental car booking as well as movie ticketing. Today when you make a new reservation online you have to navigate a number of pages and steps filling out information and making selections along the way. I’m sure you’re all familiar with this experience. It’s time consuming and if users leave during the work flow businesses lose out as well.
We want to make this experience better for both users and businesses. So let me show you how the Assistant can do it better. Say you get a calendar reminder about an upcoming trip. And you want to book a rental car. You can just ask Google book a national car rental from my next trip.
The Assistant opens the national website and automatically starts filling out your information on your behalf including the dates of the trip. You can confirm the details with just a tap. And then the Assistant continues to navigate the site. It even selects which car you like. It’s acting on your behalf and helping you save time but you’re always in control of the flow.
Let’s go ahead and add a car seat. And once all the details are in you can check everything one last time and just tap to finalize the reservation. You’ll immediately get a booking confirmation. It’s amazing to see the Assistant complete a task on line on your behalf in a personalized way. It understands the dates of your trip and your car preferences based on trip confirmation since email.
I also want to point out that this was not a custom integration this required no action on part of the business to implement. What you just saw is an early preview of what we are calling Duplex on the web. We’re going to be thoughtful and get feedback from both users and businesses to improve the experience and we’ll have more details later this year.
