221–230 of 786 posts
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. 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.
Anyone can have a conversation, but not everyone can author an API.
The technology is kinda cool, but when I think about the poor sound quality of some calls and my experience with voice assistants, I wonder in how many cases this will end in just garbage appointments or very poor experiences for the human on the one side of the phone.
Besides that, I like how Google is pushing to change the current way of making appointments. Maybe this will drive more small/medium businesses to use online services for appointments.
A few observations: * In the example where Google asked about holiday hours -- they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info. Interesting thought experiment is Google validating their reviews/business listings by actually calling businesses and speaking to a real human. * This is going to be fantastic for accessibility. Maybe I struggle t…
Besides the business-side run-your-business-like-a-callcenter application, this is the "caller-side" application that's going to make money for Google. The others (virtual personal assistant) have been historically hard to get mass consumers to pay for.
It's straight out of the StreetView playbook... industrialize the scale of data collection, give the results out for free, then monetize the eyeballs (eg more accurate yelp).
Then again, Google ran that free 411 service for a few years that turns out was just a massive natural voice recording data corpus miner...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They have listed the problems with such systems in the first paragraph. They claim to overcome these by restricting to very specific domains. But specific domains are usually still wide. A table for two, but in the garden or inside? Inside on which floor? Sometimes it doesn't matter, sometimes it does, and these things are specific and different for every business. Really skeptical about this. And if this does become…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't most carriers heavily "compress" the sound, removing all sounds/frequencies that a human can't hear, etc? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2A8q3XIhu0
If you listen to the sample call, the computer voice sounds incredibly _rude_, at least to my ears, especially at the end of the call. I would never speak to a service employee that way. I try to always say a clear and proper please and thank you, and would never ever want a robot to subject somebody to an"uhhhhh, thanks " on my behalf.
It seems like in addition to the globalization of Californian social and moral standards, the world will now be subjected to Californian manners. What a pity.
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 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 bot…
As we already have assistants who transmit our desires by proxy, I don't see much difference between a human and an automated script in that context---certainly not enough difference to justify the need for special-purpose law to clarify the nature of my assistant (and definitely not enough difference to justify shutting down the technology with only vague risk and no instances of social problems introduced by the tech).