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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

#211

Post by busyant »

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…

You adapt. Take valid CC info and charge cancellation fee.

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

#212

Post by Kalium »

ErikAugust wrote: post #203
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…

"Duplex seems trained against this corpus. 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." So, you would just have an automated booking system API which is better handled by not placing calls as its form of communication. Right?

Yes!

This is an API that requires no computer on the user's end and is portable across different implementations from different companies.

It's not ideal. Actual standardized APIs are better. But, uh, have you ever worked with industry standard APIs? I have, and standardized is not how I would describe them.

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

#213

Post by hrasyid »

ErikAugust wrote: post #203
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…

"Duplex seems trained against this corpus. 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." So, you would just have an automated booking system API which is better handled by not placing calls as its form of communication. Right?

This is my initial reaction too, but APIs need work for coding, integration, testing, make sure data is sent in the right format, etc, while voice-robot-to-voice-robot will just work out of the box.

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

#215

Post by monkeynotes »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #192
monkeynotes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be out of frequency (since that's probably filtered anyway), could be just a really quick burst handshake identifier which could encode an IP address to communicate over instead of a crummy phone line. Duplex: (I'm available to chat) Other bot: (Oh hai! Wanna get intimate?) Duplex: (Come find me on duplex://64.233.160.0)

As an end user, picking up the phone to hear a beep is not pleasant. I'm likely as not to immediately hang up, as I've come to associate beeps at the start of calls with scammers.

What about if the caller makes no such sounds and the recipient makes the offer to handshake?

Anyways, this aspect is more amusing to just think about than anything else. That said, I really hope companies who produce these next-gen AI robo-callers actually have the courtesy of identifying themselves as such. I want to know if I am talking to a human or Duplex. Yes, I may hang up, but I feel uncomfortable being fooled into thinking I am talking to a human when I am not.

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

#216

Post by stephenbez »

jokh wrote: post #168
politician wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit card companies have already solved this problem by publishing a well-known 1-800 number that their customers can call back to verify the intent of an unexpected caller. Google Duplex can do the same thing - without even staffing a call center.

I don't understand what you mean, can you elaborate? Who calls the 1-800 number, and what info do they get from the call?

If you get a call from someone who claims to work at the credit card company you use, instead of trusting the caller (who could be a scammer) and potentially divulging private information, you should just hang up and call the number on the back of your card.

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

#217

Post by joeyo »

fudged71 wrote: post #154
andrei_says_ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've noticed this as well. My working hypothesis is that one is for high(er) bandwidth and the other for low bandwidth situations.

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

#218

Post by macintux »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #192
monkeynotes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be out of frequency (since that's probably filtered anyway), could be just a really quick burst handshake identifier which could encode an IP address to communicate over instead of a crummy phone line. Duplex: (I'm available to chat) Other bot: (Oh hai! Wanna get intimate?) Duplex: (Come find me on duplex://64.233.160.0)

As an end user, picking up the phone to hear a beep is not pleasant. I'm likely as not to immediately hang up, as I've come to associate beeps at the start of calls with scammers.

Hence the idea of doing it in a frequency humans can't hear.

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

#219

Post by scarmig »

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.

Silly. The future is a stenographic handshake in the initial greeting, which negotiates an upgrade to a proprietary gRPC8 protocol when the caller and recipient are both Google, which Google uses to get a monopoly on telephone-mediated social interactions which it can then monetize by building a social graph to more efficiently target advertising to captive audiences riding Waymo cars.

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

#220

Post by CryptoPunk »

marnett wrote: post #199
CryptoPunk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend you look at the statistical evidence. The average wage in the developing world has doubled, and the global poverty rate has halved, over the last 20 years. That's all thanks to automation.

Well average wage is a poor metric. Hopefully it is median global household income that has doubled. Taken to its logical extreme, there is no wage whatsoever if a majority of jobs are automated.

The wage growth has been widely distributed, though I don't know the median wage statistics off hand. I presume they're approximately equavalent average wage statistics.

As for jobs, most of those that existed 200 years ago no longer exist or employ a tiny fraction of people they employed at that time, yet we don't have mass unemployment. Automation has never had a broad-based negative impact on the demand for labor. Its effect has been exactly the opposite.

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