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Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

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Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#11

Post by saulrh »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

I don't know if I'd call it a "deficiency" - if we interpret "disfluency" in a literal sense as "not flowing" without negative connotation, then the interruptions (hmm, uh, okay) are actually communicating useful information to the other party. I might even say that omitting those interruptions (and replacing them with, say, dead silence) might be poor communication.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#12

Post by ocdtrekkie »

politician wrote: post #10
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

Never have we had a more clear example of why Google needs to be regulated, and laws against what they're doing needs to be passed. The fact that they think it's okay to have bots pretending to be human making phone calls, shortly after demonstrating how quickly they can copy someone's voice (re: John Legend), it shows a blatant disregard for what they're creating.

At the very least, there should be an requirement to identify when challenged. "Are you a bot?" "Yes, I am Google Duplex v1.2. This call is being recorded; you can see our privacy policy and terms of service at http://google.com/duplex."

I agree, but the social pressure not to use it would be immense. Imagine the awkward moments where we start confronting people who call us and asking them if they're real.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#13

Post by 542458 »

This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#14

Post by cletus »

luckydata wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.

This is a pretty common pattern. Lots of websites also have "establishing secure connection" interstitials for the same reason.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#15

Post by jfaucett »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

> as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.

well, in semantics/pragmatics these discourse particles are often not deficiencies at all. They are signals with practical semantic purpose. "hmms" and "uhs" can signal attentiveness, turn-taking (turn holding, turn yielding, etc), agreement - just to name a few.

For any machine system to be able to pass as human, it will have to be able to control these nuances or people will pick up on something being wrong, though they might not be able to articulate precisely what.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#16

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

[deleted]

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#18

Post by jonbarker »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

Ums and other filler words are not as bad as they are made out to be among the public speaking crowd: https://www.eab.com/daily-briefing/2016/07/29/um-filler-word...

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#20

Post by jawns »

politician wrote: post #10
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

Never have we had a more clear example of why Google needs to be regulated, and laws against what they're doing needs to be passed. The fact that they think it's okay to have bots pretending to be human making phone calls, shortly after demonstrating how quickly they can copy someone's voice (re: John Legend), it shows a blatant disregard for what they're creating.

At the very least, there should be an requirement to identify when challenged. "Are you a bot?" "Yes, I am Google Duplex v1.2. This call is being recorded; you can see our privacy policy and terms of service at http://google.com/duplex."

This reminds me of some of Isaac Asimov's short stories in which the Three Laws are used to force robots to identify themselves.
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