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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

#71

Post by guiomie »

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.

How would you handle deepfakes? This is much more disturbing than what is in the post, and it isn't a corporation who built it. I don't think this has anything to do with regulating google.

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

#72

Post by kowdermeister »

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.

Would you say the same thing if this tech was created by a small company?

Voice copying is nothing new, many methods exists so I don't see how Google doing this is somehow bad. It's uncanny to say the least, but laws against tech progress? Come on :)

Did you think that advancing AI will be not creepy especially when it's good?

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

#73

Post by shashanoid »

pg_bot wrote: post #59
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…

If you are building a system that mimics human speech you need to teach it to be imperfect and use common parlance. Otherwise you will fall into the uncanny valley. If you listen to the conversation again there are several points where they lose immersion. For example no one would say 12 pm, they would say 'noon' instead. Google has clearly done some impressive work here, and I'm now a bit more confident/scared that…

Your argument about calling it "noon" instead of "PM" is just illogical. I'd always use PM instead of noon -- whenever I'm trying to be specific about something (appointments and such). I understand the argument you're trying to make but that wasn't enough.

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

#74

Post by spydum »

freehunter wrote: post #70
jbob2000 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home. Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and y…

Was there something stopping you from doing that before? A lot of places you can even do it online.

literally effort. when you lower the attackers effort and cost to try an attack, the attempts generally go up.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

jbob2000 wrote: post #61
apendleton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling…

So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home. Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and y…

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by freehunter »

gowld wrote: post #44
Moto7451 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.

That's the opposite of what parent and other commenters are saying. Users prefer the loading animations, according to the growth hackers.

I think they were agreeing. "Test out of" seems to be another way of saying "we tried getting rid of the spinners but people didn't like it"?

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

#78

Post by freehunter »

spydum wrote: post #74
freehunter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there something stopping you from doing that before? A lot of places you can even do it online.

literally effort. when you lower the attackers effort and cost to try an attack, the attempts generally go up.

I meant, you could build a bot that calls. We have the technology already, and the people on the other end probably won't notice. Plus the "do it over the Internet" thing where screen scraping and scripting is super easy.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

jbob2000 wrote: post #61
apendleton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling…

So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home. Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and y…

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by throwawayjava »

menzoic wrote: post #60
apendleton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling…

I don't think the scaling concern should be underestimated. Thats a big difference. Its mostly a numbers game.

It's not just scaling, but also speed.

If you sequentially attack a subpopulation (e.g., employees at a company, senior citizens) the eventually news about your attack will spread throughout that network (internal security alert, evening news+daily newspapers+AARP+...). If you attack the entire subpopulation in rapid succession over the course of days or even hours, educational countermeasures become much less effective.

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