They have published multiple major TTS papers since the original WaveNet paper in 2016. Including the recent Tacotron results with impressive style control.

Tacotron (Mar. 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10135

Parallel WaveNet (Nov. 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10433

Tacotron again (Mar 2018): https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09017

Tacotron 2 audio samples: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_...

I immediately discounted the whole "Uh Huh" "Hmmm" thing as just a cheap psychological trick - a way to humanize the interaction without requiring much effort at all. As for the rest of it, I didn't necessarily tag it as fake but I did recognize that the act of making a reservation is a fairly structured process, requiring the exchange of a few critical pieces of information in a quick and efficient manner. But not necessarily something to be bowled over by, and no doubt something well-rehearsed in this case. Given the choice, though, I will generally always go online to take care of something like this rather than interact with a human anyway, since there's always the possibility that they will just screw it up on their end.

BTW, I have no particular reason to trust (nor distrust) anything Google says or does.

This is a long shot but, do you think it is at all possible that they've had some kind of a breakthrough using their quantum processing work, and are using that to accelerate machine learning models and produce much better quality generative speech? After hearing about Bristlecone I can't rule it out.

That would be a monumental case of burying the lede...

Surely if they had that computing power they would just be breaking crypto and stealing money all day long?

Why the downvote?!!?