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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

#251

Post by whazor »

braindongle wrote: post #249
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…

Absolutely correct. And so-called general AI may never happen. Regardless, this is shocking. It immediately needs to be factored into any speculation about what the world will look like in 20 years. Innumerable questions.

Maybe a general AI is just a very big collection of many smaller abilities.

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

#252

Post by wyck »

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…

> People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses,

But that in itself is not even true across the industry, some(most) phone bookings are very complex, otherwise they would just use a web interface.

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

#253

Post by ambicapter »

stefan_ wrote: post #227
Svenskunganka wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So just put it in the hearable spectrum. Phones already make all kinds of sounds that no one under the age of 35 has any clue what they mean or why they are needed, and frankly they aren't.

beep boop.

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

#254

Post by kingnothing »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #88
kingnothing wrote: post #40

Google home's speech recognition can't even reliably turn my lights on and off every time, why would I trust it to book a restaurant reservation? I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.

You're comparing different generations of technologies.

I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that Google would have one backend service or set of services for all speech to text translation, and that all related products would be powered by it. They've been iterating on speech to text interfaces for at least 15 years now.

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

#255

Post by modeless »

JepZ wrote: post #223

Interesting, many people here seem to be fascinated by this and I am sitting here thinking: Oh my good, I hope I will never have to work on a phone receiving such calls. 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…

Talking with humans is often a poor experience too. I can imagine employees of small businesses preferring to talk to Google rather than customers directly, as unlike real customers Google should be predictable, and never frustrated or angry.

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

#256

Post by ryanwaggoner »

floatrock wrote: post #207
empath75 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The end game is clearly to use an api, not this. My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all. Voice bots like this will have the advantage of ubiquity. At least a couple years ago before every resteraunt had 5 tablets for all their seamless/grubhub/chowhound/whatever apps, pretty much the only rea…

pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering

The fax machine is still around now, and heavily used in the medical context: https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...

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

#257

Post by theptip »

Paul-ish wrote: post #190
Pfhreak wrote: post #176

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…

> Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose. This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. This time commitment asymmetry will be the issue with these systems. Like emai…

> If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

Or being forced to use for Google's small business version of Duplex to handle the increased call load (for a small fee of course).

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

#258

Post by zerostar07 »

The problem they are going after is that small businesses don't have an online appointment system. Wouldn't it be simpler if they made one and offered it for free to all businesses? The voice demo was fun to borderline creepy, but are we really at the point where this can work at scale?

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

#259

Post by Noos »

annexrichmond wrote: post #248

The technology is really awesome but I'm not convinced it will fly: * How much time do people really save, the call in the example is less than a minute. Maybe if you need to call like 10 places it becomes more helpful, but as companies get a bigger online presence (and they are) this technology becomes less useful. You can already make reservations/book appointments, find contracts pretty easily online. * You can't…

yeah, my first thought was how useless this is, since it's going to take a lot more time to program the robocall with the information and read the text digest of the order than it is just to call or text yourself.

And this thing will have to text digest it, it can't simply record the call without identifying it is doing so, and that's destroying the illusion they are crafting.

The tech is extremely impressive, but this use case makes little sense except as a way to humanize it and get people to like it. It has to be more for businesses or some other solution.

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

#260

Post by thaumasiotes »

jdietrich wrote: post #84
gowld wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.

OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing. Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. The…

> Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress

I disagree with this; I find the progress bars more credible with erratic timing. (And ideally, a display of the task currently at hand, like "Copying tiny file. Copying tiny file. Copying giant file............")

A progress bar that smoothly fills from 0 to 100 looks like an animation that somebody thought it would make you happy to watch. A progress bar that lags at 7% and then rushes the rest of the way looks like the software has some internal metric for task completion, and is reporting according to that metric. This implies that when the number changes, progress has happened, which isn't the case for a progress bar that isn't affected by workload.

The software can't use "how much time has elapsed?" as a progress metric, because it doesn't know how much time things will take, and because the passage of time does not actually cause -- or reflect -- any progress. That progress bar would be a spinner, not a progress bar.

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