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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

#81

Post by jbob2000 »

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.

Yes, the time commitment of having one person pickup the phone and place 100+ phone calls (and the suspicion on the other end when you call back with a new name but the same voice).

You could write a screen scraper to book online through the various booking systems, but each booking system probably has its own restrictions on how many accounts you can have and how often they can book. You skip all of these protections when you phone your reservation in (arguably, the restaurant staff should be enforcing these protections when they pick up the phone, but restaurant staff are often overworked and apathetic).

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

#82

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
jonknee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most inefficient API you could design!

Seriously. Instead of a single, clean restaurant reservation HTTP POST API, the future is two neural nets modulating and demodulating the request to and from inexact and potentially ambiguous English audio.

To be fair, we could make the same complaint in regards to the web - it's largely all plain-text on a line, as opposed to some form of compiled bytecode (I know, it's coming).

What we lose in using human speech for precision we make up in it being pretty much universal. Talk about an adaptable interface. You can phone the restaurant and do anything from reserving a table to ordering takeout to informing them that their cat is on fire.

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

#83

Post by option_greek »

madeofpalk wrote: post #69
have_faith wrote: post #27

One positive thing about our dystopian future is that it will force us to meet up more in person, if only to confirm our friends are real.

But then you would need to shoot them to see if they bleed or not.

And claw at your own eyes to make sure you are not in a VR :)

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

#84

Post by jdietrich »

gowld wrote: post #39
jdietrich wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really just an audio version of a loading bar or spinner - users get really uncomfortable if the UI becomes unresponsive for even a few hundred milliseconds, but they'll wait for several seconds if it looks like something is happening. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise

People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.

OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing.

Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays.

Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress; in most cases, this could be greatly improved with a bit of educated guesswork.

A completely fictitious progress bar can be extremely credible, because it's totally predictable - if you need to create a 10 second delay, then it's easy to make the bar progress linearly from 0% to 100% in that time. Users learn very quickly that your progress bar tells the truth about how long they'll be waiting, even though it's lying about the reason for the wait.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by strictnein »

SilasX wrote: post #55
strictnein wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen to the audio examples. The person at the restaurant misheard the bot and repeated incorrect information back to it and it handled it in stride.

I just hope it never gets one of the 9 out of 10 humans who don't repeat back important information to prevent miscommunication...

How would the bot fair worse than a normal human in that situation?

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

#87

Post by jacquesm »

kingnothing wrote: post #40

Google home's speech recognition can't even reliably turn my lights on and off every time, why would I trust it to book a restaurant reservation? I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.

> I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.

That's a win, consider: It's the right restaurant, on the right date and 10 is larger than 2 so there'll be room enough. Ok, you have to wait two hours but given that this tiny place is normally so busy you have to book in advance what you lost in time waiting you will more than make up by the fact that you'll be the only people there expecting service.

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

#88

Post by AndrewKemendo »

kingnothing wrote: post #40

Google home's speech recognition can't even reliably turn my lights on and off every time, why would I trust it to book a restaurant reservation? I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.

You're comparing different generations of technologies.

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

#90

Post by anudeep2011 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #62
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am far more afraid of technology we can't control that works for an ad company, not for us, than moving technology forward a little bit slower. We need to be able to trust our communication, and we're moving away from that at light speed. Where a company whose entire business model is to subtly influence you in the directions profitable to them is the middleman in all of our communications. I am terrified of this.…

It's tough here because Google is both an ad company and a product company (funded through ads). Would you have the same fears if Apple were able to (through some ridiculous miracle) achieve the same thing?

"(through some ridiculous miracle)" -> best part of your comment :-D
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