What Google didn’t announce at I/O, defining “dark flow” and ignoring your first brain to build your second one

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:05)
Hey, Andrew, so are you giving your agent a phone number yet? I heard this is like all the rage, all of a sudden.

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:11)
Well, you know, a lot of parents won't even give their kids a phone until they're 13 So why would I give my agent a phone when it's like three months old?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:18)
Exactly, right? That's terrifying. What about you?

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:23)
Would you equip your agent with a 10 digit cell phone number?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:28)
Well, you know, I didn't even have to think about it for like even a second. I was like, obviously the answer is no, but then my second thought was, oh, we're now at the future where AI is just going to be spam dialing me. Through OpenClaw and Polyreach is this thing that we're talking about right now, where you can apparently give your agent a real number to make phone calls, which just seems like a nightmare to me.

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:52)
It's really interesting, the idea of pairing your agent with a phone number. Polyreach's take on giving your agent more of a presence in our reality is, they're not alone in taking that stake in trying to bring agents closer into the world we live in, because I've seen versions of this kind of tool that give your agent like a bonafide email inbox somewhere or even a bank account. And that's not even to say for all of the agent activity that happens on places like on blockchains as well. So you have a lot of people trying to equip them to interact with the economics of our world. But personally, I'm going to save the phone number for later. Maybe we can just stick to the...
Can't we just stick to the Telegram chat? Like, why do we have to complicate this?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:35)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I will say, though, that I've been in places where I don't speak the language, and I would like to make a reservation for, like, a certain time, you know? And being able to, like, have a service that could call on my behalf and, like, handle that for me.
But of course, I would not trust my open-claw agent connected to a phone number to figure this one out. Like, I'd be too paranoid that I'd get something wrong.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:59)
There is something there about the idea of turning the agent into your phone assistant or your own, you know, personal assistant. Because, as we know, like, phone menus and calling in somewhere to talk to a human, they're obstructed with all of these walls purposefully meant to slow us down. It's purposefully designed to be a bad UX, because, frankly, most companies are optimizing or reducing those number of calls and handling them before they get to an agent. So there's so much incentive to actually keep you from doing that. But by putting the power of an agentic phone assistant in your fingertips, it kind of puts more power in the consumer's hands because they can send that agent, that assistant, down, you know, the IVR menu or the wormhole to eventually talk with somebody. It can sit on the weight music and listen to, you know, the metal music from the 80s. And you can just do something else and it'll let you know when it's ready. But this actually isn't anything brand new by itself. The concept I'm describing was actually some of the first things that we saw from Google on like the Google Pixel system, I think even years ago, of it being able to call in and handle like a wait time on your behalf. So you're just going to see more and more of these kinds of technologies evolve. And in this case, maybe being paired with an autonomous agent, you start to get some really interesting use cases.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (3:23)
Well, before we spoil some of the news today, we'll get into Google.
Welcome to the Friday Deploy, brought to you by LinearB. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Ziegler** (3:32)
And I'm your host, Andrew Ziegler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (3:34)
And speaking of Google, this week, we are recapping of all the news that caught our eye from Google IO.,
a Vibe coding research project that could use your help, how to distill yourself with AI and an open source obsidian alternative that just seems like a personal attack at me. But before we get into the personal attacks, we, of course, have to cover all of the announcements that were made at Google IO this week. But the biggest one probably being the announcement of Gemini Spark, which people are out there comparing it to OpenClaw or it's like Google's version of it or whatever. I mean, in a sense, maybe there are some parallels, but it's basically Google's always on AI agent that runs across their suite of cloud tools. You know, it can write emails, it can manage your calendar, monitor certain types of things like expenses, and integrates across all the Google Suite, some third party tools as well. And it really is just designed to help you work across your entire ecosystem of Google products. And it just seems like this is a thing a lot of companies are doing right now, this type of agent that operates on their data. And I get why a company, these companies release or releasing these types of agent frameworks for their products, but I don't know, I kind of feel like they're missing the point sometimes with how AI can actually help automate our lives. But I don't know, what do you think, Angie, before I get into that?