> you're being fairly pretentious as if you're too busy to pick up the phone
I don't think this is a good argument. The same idea, applied to other domains, sounds outlandish:
- you're too busy to drive to the store to buy something [using Amazon]
- you're too busy to pick up a pen and write a letter [using email]
- you're too busy to pick up the phone [using SMS]
The progress of technology is literally about removing friction from tasks which previously took longer amounts of time, and (except at the beginning, maybe?) this is rarely interpreted as pretentiousness.
Of the non-technical people that I've spoken to about Duplex (only 4, admittedly), they were universally excited by the demo.
As far as the proliferation of scammers, I think you're absolutely correct. I think it's plausible that human callers will incorporate challenge-response questions to check for things like this ("Who is Batman's sidekick?", "If I were unfairly comparing two fruits, what would they be?", etc).
Then again, who's to say that Google will make their tech available outside the company? The accuracy of the demos probably largely stems from the massive dataset that Google has amassed, which won't be available to scammers.