Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Being a science fiction writer, and a science geek, and doing lots of research for my new book, I have lots of fingers in all sorts of pies. One of which is the Medium newsletter.

A little while back the published this lovely, clickbait-y titled article – Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test?

First up, some extremely basic definitions …

… an extremely basic description of Google Duplex: a software program that enables a conversation between humans and computers … and an extremely basic description of the Turing Test: One person listens to two others having a conversation, one of which is a computer. If the listener can’t tell which ‘voice’ is the computer, the computer passes the Turing Test, and gets a nice little certificate welcoming it to the Sentient Species of the Galaxy Club (I made that last little bit up. It’s more of…