Okay Google, Where Is My Secretary?

Human office assistants face a challenge with the advent of intelligent bots. But don’t write them off just yet

- Pankti Mehta Kadakia

Two months ago, Delhi-based gynaecologist Dr Shelly Batra fired her secretary. As the co-founder of Operation Asha, a non-profit that takes tuberculosis (TB) treatment to the underprivileged, Dr Batra mainly used her assistant to type out grant applications and emails. Now, Google’s voice-to-text technology does it for her at no cost.

“I used to pay my secretary ₹35,000 a month,” she says. “As a non-profit, we’re conscious about minimising administrative costs. I tried to look for someone at a lower salary, but there was such a quality drop that I would have to retype an email after I had dictated it.”

So, when the company’s chief technology officer introduced her to the voice-to-text features on Google Docs and on her iPhone, Batra was thrilled to have found a solution. “It took me a minute to learn. It’s literally ill as simple as talking,” she says. “I’m no longer dependent on anyone and can work whenever and wherever I want to. I can dictate text even as I take a walk.” The saved secretary salary goes towards TB patients, she adds.

In May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated a sci-fi-like call between a Google Assistant and a hair salon, set up to book a haircut appointment. Complete with umms, pauses and inflections in all the right places, the voice assistant sounded so human that it set off a debate on bot ethics and disclosure rules. What it also did was shake everything we thought we knew about voice assistants and their near-future capabilities—a sign of things to come.

With Amazon’s Alexa making your travel arrangements, Google booking appointments and a suite of software options to manage your schedule, is the role of the human secretary, as we know it, at risk to robots?

The short answer is yes. But it’s more complicated than that.

TAKING OFFICE