John Gruber Wrong About the Duplex Demo

I spent lots of time on typography, so you should read this article in its original form at John Gruber Wrong About the Duplex Demo

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John Gruber of Daring Fireball took a big shot at Google Duplex recently.

He basically said that the way the demo was conducted should make us doubt the legitimacy of the tech.

Why not demo it live? Why only play recordings? When is it rolling out to actual customers? Was there a hands-on after the event where members of the media or conference attendees could talk to Duplex? It’s totally credible that Google would be the first to achieve something like Duplex, but the fact that all they did — as far as I’ve seen — was play a recording just seems off. It feels like a con.

Source: Daring Fireball

I disagree.

I think the demos were spot on, and accurate.

The danger of doing a live demo is that you have so little time, and you might hit a snag.

The person might not answer
It might be a bad connection
It might be a scenario that the AI doesn’t pick up
Other things we’re not thinking of

If there is 5% chance that that would happen, and a 95% chance that it wouldn’t, they’re still taking a massive risk by doing the demo because they could destroy the product’s reputation in one shot when it actually is super useful even in its current state.

So unless they’re lying about being close, and about it being useful already, I think they did the right thing.

And we’ll know that anyway by how quickly it comes to the market.

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Thank you,

Daniel