San Francisco — The most talked-about, futuristic product from Google’s developer show is not even finished yet — and Google has not even agreed how to do it. At its Input/Output (I/O) conference on Tuesday, Alphabet’s Google previewed Duplex, an experimental service that lets its voice-based digital assistant book appointments on its own. It was part of a slate of features, such as automated writing in e-mails, where Google touted how its artificial intelligence (AI) technology saves people time and effort. In a demonstration on stage, the Google Assistant spoke with a hair salon receptionist, mimicking the "ums" and "hmms" pauses of human speech. In another demo, it chatted with a restaurant employee to book a table. The audience of software coders cheered. Outside the Google technology bubble, critics pounced. The company is placing robots in conversations with humans, without those people realising. The obvious question soon followed: should AI software that’s smart enough to tr...
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