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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

#151

Post by defen »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #114
fixermark wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the two technologies you've highlighted, what specific regulation would you recommend be added to prevent what bad behavior?

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…

> if the example calls at I/O were not staged, and real calls, I suspect the recording of them would be illegal in many jurisdictions, including California.

Interesting implications there for how Google will measure / improve the effectiveness of Duplex. Where is the line drawn between recording a call and recording data derived from a call? e.g. clearly recording the call unilaterally is illegal. Presumably just storing a hash of the audio data would be legal, but also useless. Is there some middle ground that is legal, but also useful?

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

#152

Post by cromwellian »

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.

The irony of someone named ‘...trekkie’, a fan of a future where a military alliance of uber powerful weaponry capable of destroying populations, while continually proclaiming they’re on a mission of peace, featuring computers pretending to be people and doing work for them, androids, and synthetic holographic ar/vr people criticizing primitive AI tech is a bit rich.

We’ve arrived at full Luddism now where life saving and time saving technology in fields like health, transportation, and customer service will be inhibited by hyperbolic fearmongering.

Are you going to pass laws against realistic sounding synthetic voices? Against computers that understand queries “too well”? Against self driving vehicles that drive better and safer than people? All on theoretical harm that actually hasn’t taken place because you’ve watched too many dystopian Netflix sci-fi episodes?

I don’t know what’s more dangerous, the real Skynet, or people who might harm millions by voting for political policies that inhibit real improvements that could be made to help them.

At least, if you want to talk AI being used for harmful things we could discuss feed optimization that parasitizes people’s attention spans and keeps them glued or wasting money on pulling more slot machine levers. Technology that wastes people’s time and money as opposed to things that make people more efficient.

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

#153

Post by tyrankh »

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.

Not backwards compatible. :)

(I mean that as both a joke and a real comment - you could never force every restaurent in the world to learn REST, but you sure can call a bunch of them)

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

#154

Post by fudged71 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #130
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…

Google maps has the most pleasant and human sounding voice approach I’ve encountered in any such system. All other gps guidance voices sound incredibly crude and mechanical in comparison.

In my city I can recognize that google has two different 'voices' or voice libraries. They sound slightly different. I'm curious how that works and why it's not all done with one.

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

#155

Post by spdustin »

> [...] we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data.

That's alarming, and thinly cloaked in euphemism (IMO). "Conversation data" here means recordings of actual human-to-human calls, as well as their automated transcriptions. Both were used.

Where did that source audio come from?

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

#156

Post by amhokies »

politician wrote: post #26
whatever_dude wrote: post #9

Can't decide whether this is amazing or scary.

Just wait until a Google Duplex caller "on behalf of a client" calls to schedule a reservation at a restaurant using Google Duplex to answer the phones.

I wonder if it would be able to tell if it was talking to another Duplex bot and instead of speaking in English, it would communicate more efficiently.

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

#158

Post by lukeqsee »

punnerud wrote: post #148
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.

Did we just reinvent dialup?

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

#159

Post by danpalmer »

punnerud wrote: post #148
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.

You’re totally right.

However while this is useful to bootstrap a new technology rollout, 10 years on its just technical debt.

The amount of tech debt in the system behind credit cards is crazy, because originally charges where phoned in to the card issuer manually, and everything from then on - magstripe, chip & PIN, online only transactions, etc, has all been built on top, and the leaky abstractions show through in daily difficulties with the card system for end users, like lack of real-time balance (in some cases), lack of transaction metadata, etc.

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