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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

>This sounds like a nightmare for businesses.

They pointed out during the presentation that the system could call once to a business and get the hours, then allow hundreds or thousands of users to see that without bothering the business again. Assuming it works, it could save a significant amount of time for some places.

>If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them.

If they allow something like the parent commenter pointed out, they would sour relationships with businesses who would promptly seek out ways to block or decline calls from this system.

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This works only if Google allows that same data to be used by other businesses who would benefit from having it listed.

Technically it works as long as most users use Google, but I agree it would work better if they share the data!

If they don't share the data then businesses will start being bombarded with bot calls (whether they know they are bots or not) once businesses start copying it, which should lead to regulation, however with how easily scams happen through the phone lines - I don't know how they'd be able to regulate and enforce this either to protect businesses' time.

>>If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

>Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them.

But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business.

Seems far more likely that they'd pay Google to automatically handle duplex calls for them.

The worse this technology turns out for businesses, the more pressure there is to pay google money.

>But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business.

If it's costing more money than it's bringing in, then it's no longer worth it. If it's bringing in more money than it costs, then it's a good thing for the business.

If a business needs to hire a dedicated phone person because they are getting so many appointments filled, they aren't going to be upset. But if they get so many flakers that won't show up, they are losing money as customers that will show up are getting pushed out, so they will block Duplex. There are also other ways to solve this problem, require a phone number and name and block or charge people for missed appointments if they try to reschedule. Require some kind of down-payment over the phone when making the appointment. There are tons of solutions to this problem.

At no point is "Pay google to handle the calls" an option. This is really only for places that don't have an online appointment system (that possibly integrates into google), so the solution to the duplex calls would be to invest in one. Since "pay google to handle duplex" would look a lot like an API to a scheduling system anyway, and an independent one (with integrations into Google's systems) would reach more customers.

Google may not be making money from direct payments from businesses, but getting access to yet another aspect of the life of their users (in this case, appointments made with what business and when), would be invaluable to them.

Just one more way that big business is taking over our lives. The world is becoming incredibly scary.

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