Last week, Google gave the world more information about Duplex, its experimental conversational AI that makes phone calls to schedule appointments or make restaurant reservations on your behalf. With initial trials expected to begin in the coming weeks, the company shared additional details about how it will navigate communication between a Google Assistant user and businesses.

We’ll soon find out just how effective Google Assistant is at speaking for users, but should Duplex succeed, the logical next question is what will happen when AI that carries out tasks for people goes mainstream and must communicate not just with people, but with other bots?

If Duplex is a harbinger of things to come, bot-to-bot communication will soon be critical, which is why the makers of assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant need to work together.

AI assistants have been around for a while, and growing rates of adoption can be attributed in large part to their declining word error rate and increased ability to understand human language. But collaboration between the major players will be essential in allowing the next generation of assistants to develop helpful use cases like Duplex and enjoy widespread adoption.

The most significant example of cooperation between the makers of assistants we have so far is the Alexa-Cortana partnership announced in 2017. Amazon and Microsoft are planning to provide Cortana access on Echo devices and Alexa access on Windows 10 PCs because, they said, we will come to live in a multi-assistant world.

This feature, which we got to see in action for the first time in May, essentially makes the most widely available assistant in homes (Alexa) work with the most widely available assistant on personal computers (Cortana). This goes further than the nonexistent interaction between other assistants today, and Alexa can even tell jokes about Cortana, but it only changes where you can access the assistants and does not appear to incorporate the sort of intercommunication that will make living in a multi-assistant world a viable option.