Google’s demonstration in April 2018 of how its Assistant was able to phone a hairdresser and make an appointment without the person on the other end of the phone being at all aware that they were speaking to a machine showed how far voice – and AI – has come in a short time.
“The Google device has started to separate the consumer from the business they’re interacting with,” said Sam Hill, head of engineering at the BBC, and is opening up the prospect of bots talking to bots. “It’s a very interesting future exploding,” he suggested to the Digital...