The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care.

It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one.

That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laundry and a load of dishes each day while the kids were having naps. If we were low on detergent or supplies that the kids needed, we gave her cash and she'd pick it up on her way in. If somebody needed to be at the house for some reason, she was there and neither my wife nor I had to remove ourselves from work to take care of it.

We literally came home from work, ate dinner, played with the kids. When the weekends came around we didn't have to dedicate a chunk of it to laundry/cleaning.

It was pretty fantastic.

I can only imagine how having a actual assistant would take things to the next level.

All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet.

When Google can call my cable company, wade through the phone tree and get a service appointment or issue resolved...I'll be all over it. Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me.

Those are the time wasters I'd want saved. What Google is doing here is equivalent of automating the functionality that people pay for with OnStar.

> All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet.

Even scheduling appointments as in their demo can be really beneficial. My wife and I both work, I have flexibility to make calls during the day but she really doesn't. As a teacher she's constantly having her lunch or short breaks while the kids are at recess taken up by work issues. A surprising number of places are also closed shortly after she gets off work as well. Yesterday she tried to make an appointment with her doctors office and spent her full ten minute recess time on hold. She did end up getting through after school right before they closed but spent an additional ten minutes on hold. None of our doctors, dentists, barbers/stylists have online booking systems. The doctors offices have automated appointment reminder systems but that's it.

> Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me.

This doesn't work for someone in her situation. There are a ton of hourly workers that are in the same boat. I showed my wife the demo of duplex last night and her responses were that it was amazing and unfortunate that it wasn't available yet.

Seconded ;-) a few years in the UK ago I was a committee that ran the national raft race for an organisation like rotoract (the youth side of rotary) about a hundred teams and 1500 participants over the weekend (we also laid on camping and entertainment for the 3 days).

One of the other members was the PA to the chief fire officer for the county (State in us terms) and they where so efficient it was amazing.

At the first meeting before it started they had already worked out what formal letters need to be written updated them from last year and got the other committee members to sign - two copies on to send an done for the file.

I'm curious where you live. In my area, a "nanny" is exclusively or childcare (and well paid, including Social Security and Unemployment premiums), with no meal prep or laundry. We "cleaned the house for the nanny" to avoid embarrassment. Honestly it felt more like we were charitable sponsors to an underemployed youth (in exchange for having someone fulfill the obligation of keeping the toddler accompanied) than we were hiring an employee.

It's a far cry from the do-everything (and possibly cash-under-the-table) servant help I've seen in the past/elsewhere.

We started out with childcare only and then after she'd been there for about a month offered a $2 / hr increase if she was up for the load of laundry + dishes.

I live in the Greenville, SC area and we went through a local screening and hiring service here that also helps people find baby sitters.

I believe the last half of your message (ie. a virtual assistant) is going to be really big in the future.

It should be able to handle basically any rote tech interaction for you, from shopping, people screening, service issues, non-personal mails, you name it. If for example the back-end service issue channel on a shop ran a matching protocol then the issue could be logged in fractions of a second, the savings in time for both you and the company in question would be huge. (Of course raising problems if you can't afford your own assistant and now need to call in manually to the 3 human operators that are still employed).

Combine that with a physical assistant (robot) that can handle the physical tasks such as bringing the shopping inside and storing it, managing cleaning etc and you're going to have a winning combo.

So you enjoy being on hold for long periods of time and having to deal with unhelpful customer service representatives?

Speak for yourself.

Sure sure. The question is how large a market people like you actually make up, since companies like Google usually want to make products that can reach as many people as possible.

I doubt it's unusual. My father used to solve this problem by making my mother make all the calls, but that is a harder sell these days.