21–30 of 786 posts
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.
This is amazing! I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards with the same/fewer input resources. In short, technology is a wonderful thing that allows very low marginal costs. This is what we need to make the future a better place, given a consistent or growing population. "Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more…
> I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards. That's been the dream for a long time in some circles. With the enormous productivity gains and ability to leverage external energy sources (fossil fuels, solar, etc.) we could have built a society of wealth and leisure for all. Maybe we will still. The hope is that if there is enough…
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.
They explicitly say:
> We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context.
You note:
> laws against what they're doing needs to be passed.
What makes you say that robots making phone calls should be illegal? This seems an odd position to have. Do you also believe that it should be illegal for robots to clean floors? Or for your machine learning spam filter to process and filter your emails?
If I sound a little frustrated, I am. I'm scared that the future where technology allows us to do more with less will be blunted due to calls for making robot tasks illegal. I'd love if you'd help me understand what makes you take your position - I'm sure it's logical, and it's just a matter of me being able to understand your perspective. Can you help me understand?
> 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…
The speech disfluencies used by Duplex in the salon and restaurant interactions are perfect examples of why natural speech sounds natural. It's the cadence as well as the timing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can't decide whether this is amazing or scary.
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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.