I'm sure GrubHub, delivery.com, and all of the other takeout startups are already working to clone this technology. Once an established partner of these small businesses can do the job, this will be sold for spare parts.

It makes me wonder why Google didn't just offer this as a service to other SaaS startups. Don't they have some type of cloud platform for that? /s

It is surprising why Google just didn't offer this as a service. You could already build something like this using platforms like Twilio, KOOKOO(in India) etc. We at Ozonetel, already provide a business phone service similar to this for our customers using Google speech as one speech engine, though spam detection is not yet inbuilt. After looking at the launch, I just quickly put together a bot page if someone wants to try it out, https://ering.me/ozonetel/spa/

Note:I am a co founder of KOOKOO.

Strange in this case that they are charging for it right out of the gate. Google hasn't really done that with other experimental projects, right?

Google App Engine was charged out of the gate and then they increased the price on it. Does that count ?

The marketing pitch can be "we sell our service, not ads".