The super-API: Can Google Duplex make any machine talk to any other machine?
When I saw the amazing Google Duplex demo from the latest Google I/O conference I was, like everybody else, blown away by the capability of the machine to understand human speech.
It’s easy imagining a world where computers make bookings and order food for us and take the place of the caller.
But why not make it take the place of the receiver, the person who answers, as well?
That would mean computers talking to other computers to handle bookings and stuff for us.
Which brings us to APIs.
An API, Application Programming Interface, is a protocol or language, a programmer can use to make her code speak to another system.
APIs are fantastic but also quite limited. The programmer calling the API has to call it exactly as intended and can’t get access to any part of the system that’s not opened up by an API.
Google Duplex might change all that. Computers can “talk” to each other. No API is needed.
(Wrote this is April 2018 but didn’t publish it right away.)
