By now, you must have heard about some of Google’s new features on I/O 2018 Keynote. You and I are super excited about what Google has to offer. Indeed, the new feature of Gmail based on Google’s AI that predicts and writes your emails for you is a dream comes true. In addition, virtual reality feature in Google Maps is also an incredible idea.

I always wanted to have a digital assistant who can do all sorts of cool things in real-time. I’m sure that you’ve asked all kinds of weird questions to your digital personal assistant Siri (Apple) and Alexa (Amazon) like: Tell me a joke? Are you spying on me? Are you alive? However, the new features of Google Assistant (known as Google Duplex) have put him in the spotlight.

The hype of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning is getting bigger and bigger day by day. The modern technology developers are building new technologies based on AI and machine learning to get better, faster, and more efficient performance for their products. There has been plenty of research done on AI and machine learning about what we can accomplish with it for many years, but now they have become hot topics in the tech industry. Indeed, artificial intelligence can ease our daily life by doing many things for us that we don’t want to do such as making a phone call and make an appointment for hair cutting. Now, Google Assistant can do it for you on behalf of yourself as described in the Google's I/O 2018 Keynote by the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

You might have seen and experienced how technology can influence your behavior or life for better and worse. For instance, the Social Media. It's a controversial topic. I think that almost every new technology comes with some pros and cons when developers build for the first time. Hence, it’s developer’s responsibility to make it as secure as possible. As a matter of fact, one can never build a technology that would never have any cons. The new features of Google Assistant have been given a human-like voice to get a feeling of authentic with nuances. Well, the purpose of doing so it’s unclear.

One may argue that it has given such details, so we feel comfortable enough talking with an assistant. However, it sounds creepy if you are not informed before speaking with a digital personal assistant. Google has recently stated that Google Assistant will inform the other person that he/she is talking to a digital assistant. Moreover, according to Pichai, the new AI and machine learning algorithms can learn one’s voice much faster than it used to before and then apply to assist its users.

Nowadays, it has become extremely tough to tell what’s right and wrong on the internet. Sooner or later, we might have one more item added to the list, the artificial human voice. In the beginning phase of this new AI technology, it is hard to differentiate the difference between a voice of digital personal assistant and human being so who knows how far it will go? One can think of all the possibilities of using this technology for better and worse. In this case, we as users should ask this question NOW that how are they handling our privacy? When a mindblowing new technology comes out, it always raises a question in my mind that what more do we want from our digital personal assistant? Is it ever going to hurt our learning capabilities? or Is it going to change into digitalized humans?

I hope that everything comes out in our favor in a manner that we are expecting it to be. We have seen how one little mistake of Facebook data handling jeopardized their user’s privacy in the case of Cambridge Analytica. You can imagine all sorts of possibilities that may occur if you would have given your personal information to a digital personal assistant. In short, users and developers have to make sure that we are not digging a hole for ourselves. I am very positive that Google won't let anyone, including AI, to jeopardize our privacy.