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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

#141

Post by isthispermanent »

I did a whole write up about my homegrown attempt to do this last summer. That blog post from Google is more technical but eerily similar. https://philandrews.io/post/20000-phone-calls-later-why-siri...

In short, I don't have a lot of faith in this being plausible yet. The major reason is the phone lines. Phone call quality is not solid enough to ensure a accuracy rate high enough to roll this out as a production service. There are others, like legal considerations, but if I had to pick one that would be it.

There's a reason why this rose to number one HN, people would clamor for it. To think that Apple and Google haven't been thinking the same thing is short sited.

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

#142

Post by Florin_Andrei »

cromwellian wrote: post #128

The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is. People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases. In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot…

> The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is.

Right, and this kind of comments will continue for a while.

The question is - when the "this is trivial, move on" type of comments will start to fade out? Five years? Ten?

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

#143

Post by ocdtrekkie »

fixermark wrote: post #124
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short/immediate term, it should probably be illegal to conduct a robocall without explicit opt-in of the destination caller. (Currently, if you get a non-telemarketed robocall, it is solicited, such as you scheduled an appointment and they are reminding you of it.) Furthermore, if a robocall is permitted to be made to an unsolicited destination, a robocaller must clearly identify itself, presumably starting a…

> In the short/immediate term, it should probably be illegal to conduct a robocall without explicit opt-in of the destination caller Existing robocall law (including the National Do Not Call registry in the US) is focused around telemarketing. This isn't a telemarketing system; it's an automated assistant. I don't see the utility of applying the existing law to the new use case, as the goals are different (people at…

As I said, it should be a law, I didn't expect the existing robocall laws to apply here. Note that in no way has Google explicitly limited itself to conducting business transactions merely because that is what it demonstrated here.

The issue is that the intermediary is a Google corporate entity, theoretically acting on the user's behalf, but at the end of the day, acting on Google's behalf. Consider that Google's bots may do things in Google's best interests, not the best interests of the party on either side of the transaction.

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

#144

Post by eddieplan9 »

The demos look as exciting as any chatbot demos we saw before, and I think it will fail in practice just like how chatbots fail. With the exception of very few verticals in controlled settings, most real world tasks are way more dynamic and fluid than what we can comfortable code in some state machine. The article pointed it out, too

> One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.

The question is after you limit it to "closed domains" narrow enough, where it can still be practically useful. It might help with certain functions in enterprise settings. It will definitely work for spammers because they can work with even 1% success rate.

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

#145

Post by bduerst »

criddell wrote: post #105
bduerst wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't that different than all the bad actors calling from the "IRS". Educating people about giving personal details out over the phone has always been a challenge and will continue to be one.

Or maybe we should fix the phone system. Something is terribly broken when my connection to YouTube is better protected and authenticated than when I'm talking to the IRS over the telephone.

Why stop there? Why not fix human communication? Or how about we fix human behavior so there are no bad actors? Education may be hard, but scrapping and rebuilding a century-old communication standard in use by billions is harder.

I used the IRS example because the IRS never calls you. This is only known through experience, i.e. education.

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

#146

Post by fudged71 »

jbob2000 wrote: post #81
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.

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 protection…

Then the restaurants will just stop taking phone reservations. Either no reservations or online-only.

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

#147

Post by empath75 »

cromwellian wrote: post #128

The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is. People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases. In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot…

I love how no matter how amazing something is, someone will eventually say it's trivial, even though it's taken the smartest people on earth decades to figure out how to do this.

>The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.

The end game is clearly to use an api, not this.

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

#148

Post by punnerud »

cromwellian wrote: post #128

The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is. People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases. In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot…

To save CPU/GPU/TPU there should be a high-frequency sound, as in people can’t hear, so the computers talking to each other and switch to a faster way to communicate. If this is included you also have way to detect if you are talking to a bot/duplex.

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

#149

Post by tyrankh »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #35
arikr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned that a lack of understanding and fear will limit the benefits we get from technology. I don't think that calling for regulation and making this illegal is the appropriate next step. 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…

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.…

> 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.

I'm not sure what you're arguing for - that you wish companies weren't driving technological advancement? That Google specifically shouldn't?

Also, it's very, very conceivable that there are people for whom this technology DOES work for. The mute, for example. I'm not sure it's appropriate to speak for all of "us".

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

#150

Post by jstanley »

shashanoid wrote: post #73
pg_bot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is "PM" more specific than "noon"?

Absent the context of this conversation, it's not immediately obvious to me whether 12 PM is midday or midnight, where as "noon" is unambiguous.

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