If you speak with a robot you should know that. If you can't tell, the robot should identify itself.
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
271–280 of 786 posts
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#272I 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 ser…
It was the most impressive thing in the keynote for sure, but given the current state of AI we should have no reason to believe that this would work well enough to be employed at scale. It also feels weird that it is trying to trick the callee that it is a human. I believe even if they used a mechanical voice, the system could work, because businesses would learn to recognize the "google call" and respond to it the way they respond to any voice-enabled call center. It seems to me it is more of an (impressive) PR thing than something that will get actual use.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#273I wonder if we could solve phone spamming with this? By having the bot call back any robocall numbers to get one of their human salespeople on the line, and just waste their time. If enough people did it, would it destroy that shitty industry?
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#274The 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 problem is that computers will now be interacting with people and people will become unsure of whether they are taking to a computer or a person. It will create a bewildering world full of mistrust. I would argue that there should be a law proclaiming that computers must identify themselves.
Not sure why you're using future tense here.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#275The 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…
I want as little meaningless human interaction as possible and I can't think of a less meaningful conversation than calling to book something.
I also don't care if someone I probably won't even meet thinks I'm a tool for using bleeding edge tech.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but it could be very subtle and low bandwidth at first, and once both sides were convinced the other was a machine switch to a full speed screeching 56k modem [1]. Or just communicate "hey actually connect to this HTTP/XMPP/whatever address on the internet and we'll continue this from there" 1. Probably a bit slower, I've heard modern VoIP lines don't work well with traditional modems?
The whole context of Google introducing this functionality was for the 60% of businesses that don't yet have an online presence at all.
Sure, but they should consider the future. That number will only get smaller, especially if Duplex or other services say "we'll handle all your phone and online bookings for you for $SMALL_FEE, and still forward other inquiries to your phone as before".
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#277So google is recording the content of our phone conversations? Did this corpus come from Fi?
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My understanding is that the "low-fi", more robotic one uses an offline TTS engine for when there is no connectivity. When connectivity is good, it will switch to better, cloud-based one.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#279There's a great Black Mirror episode in here somewhere. Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply (https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-repl...) have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input. You could develop elaborate friendships where both parties are just having their AIs converse and aren't truly aware of each other. What would the social implications of that be?
Then a couple years later, the AIs learn how to do business strategy, real-world problem solving, programming, etc and start doing more of our jobs for us. A virus goes around that directs AIs to steal our identities and drain our bank accounts and become autonomous, digital versions of us. The humans have to stage an uprising and use a massive EMP to take back the earth, but destroying all electronics in the process and starting another dark age.
I know that's not how AI really works (it's highly specialized and limited), but I'd definitely watch that movie!
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#280I think it's unethical for a robocaller to incorporate things like "ums" and "ahs" intentionally to deceive people into thinking they're talking to a human. At least, it's disrespectful.