Can someone from the research community comment on how this compares to the state of the art in open research?
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
#92In the case where the person on the other end isn't a native english speaker, (the calling a restaurant clip) why doesn't Google figure out what language they speak and speak it to them?
Do Scots count as native English speakers? What about the Irish? English has a very large number of accents and dialects that all count as 'English', but typically speech recognition software only works one variety.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#93Crazy! Looks similar to Upcall.com where they have real people calling for you.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#94At last, putting the power of annoying robot phone trees in the hands of the consumer, to be directed at businesses.
For that reason alone, I'm excited. ;)
(Note: In fairness, the conversation demos are actually really slick and much better than a phone tree. I'll be interested to see how well it works in practice.)
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#95Earlier 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 does that differ from a human having the same conversation?
If I call a restaurant and say "Can I have a reservation for 6 at 8:00" and they write down a reservation for 8 at 6:00 without repeating it back I won't know until I show up at 8:00 with my 5 friends.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#96One 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.
If you can't tell if your AI friend is real, are they not a real friend? They might not be human, but they will still be your friend, no?
I think they meant: are you really talking to your friend the human, and not a bot impersonating that friend.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#97This 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!
So you simply tell google a cookie that it would keep safe, to prove it’s google when calling. Presumably it wouldn’t be on speakerphone at the time.
Have you ever wondered the same thing about your favorite OS’s admin credentials dialog? What if an app spoofs it?
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#98Never 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.
Come on now, this is cool! the correct initial reaction is to be impressed.
What is concerning is the surprising prevalence of technophobic notions on tech focused boards such as this.
There is something perverse about wanting to punish a company for creating something cool, and it’s certainly not the way our society or politics should function.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#99This 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!
Sounds like we'll have to start solving voice captchas just to call businesses.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#100> 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.
I've heard the HP12c calculator also slows down its screen refresh on purpose because people couldn't believe the math was right when it first came out and it was blazing fast.