*By Alisha Haridasani*
New evidence suggests that Google's all-to-real sounding voice assistant may not be as life-like as it first seemed, raising questions about the status of the company's A.I. capabilities.
A [demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08) last month of the A.I.-powered Duplex voice assistant showed it interacting with humans to make a restaurant reservation and a haircut appointment. But some people are saying it was faked.
Axios’s Dan Primack [pointed out](https://www.axios.com/google-ai-demo-questions-9a57afad-9854-41da-b6e2-5e55b619283e.html) that the people picking up the calls in the two demos don't identify themselves, as is the norm when small businesses receive phone calls. There was also no ambient noise in the phone calls, and neither the hair salon or the restaurant asked for the caller’s phone number for the booking.
“The whole conceit of Google Duplex is that a robot would have a conversation with a human on the other end, potentially without a human having to jump in,” said Dana Wollman, executive editor at Engadget. “So people do want to feel that this interaction was real and authentic.”
The more likely scenario is that Google may have edited the recording, protecting the businesses or the privacy of the people who answered the call, said Wollman.
“I think it is still possible that it was based on a real exchange,” she said. “If I was in Google’s PR department I would probably want to be able to show a real working demo.”
Google hasn't directly responded on the record to journalists asking about the authenticity of the recordings.
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/googles-duplex-dupe).
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
Image-sharing app Pinterest reported big beats on its Q4 earnings for the top and bottom lines. The social platform surprised investors after seeing a decline in users while earnings and revenue were much higher than expected.
