What is the future? In many ways, Google showed us today with Google Assistant at I/O 2018. On stage, CEO Sundar Pichai looked optimistic as he presented it to us, and perhaps he silently thought to himself: "these guys have no idea what is about to come”.
Google Assistant will soon be able to call restaurants and make a reservation for you
And so Pichai proceeded to play an audio recording of a phone conversation between a person and a restaurant about a reservation. The conversation continued like any booking conversation and there was a lot of back and forth before it ended.
The whole thing would have been imperceptible if the caller was actually human. Instead, the call had been made by Google Assistant, which was trying to make a reservation for you at a restaurant that only accepts call-in reservations. You can hear Google's recordings of these calls here.
Yes, Google Assistant will soon be able to call you to make certain bookings and reservations. These calls will be made in the backend and you will never hear them; they won't even have your phone number according to Google. And it already seems to work for some use cases like making salon or restaurant reservations, but only for some users.
