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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

#321

Post by wan23 »

scoofy wrote: post #194

I hang up on robocalls now... I guarantee this service is going to get hung up on more than it will work. People don't like getting treated like crap at home, why do we need to treat them like crap at work.

There's a difference between a spam robocall to your personal number and a robot calling a business line to inquire about legitimate business. I imagine if my job were answering phones I'd much prefer talking to a robot that speaks clear English over actual people who could have difficult accents or who might just be rude on the phone.

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

#322

Post by avinium »

empath75 wrote: post #147
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…

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.

If you ever needed proof of the negativity in the tech community, this thread is it.

Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".

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

#323

Post by Thespian2 »

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.

"Ba weep granna weep ninny bong"

It is the universal greeting for cybernetic organisms, after all.

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

#324

Post by txcwpalpha »

batuhanicoz wrote: post #305
tigershark wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what is a 4 star restaurant given that the Micheline guide gives maximum 3 stars, but pretty much all starred restaurants want a deposit when reserving. If seriously there was someone dumb enough to do something like this, booking and cancelling continuously restaurants, then probably everyone would require a deposit when reserving and the deposit would be much bigger than today.

I've never heard of deposits for reservations for a restaurant. And I've at least once made a reservation for restaurant with a Micheline star. I'm not sure if this is common practice at least in Europe. I'm sure it's unheard-of in Turkey (and I've been lucky enough to make reservations for some high end and/or very popular restaurants). May I ask in which countries you've experienced this in? I'm genuinely curious.

I travel all over the Us (Texas, NYC, and Cali mostly) and I've literally never had to put down any kind of deposit or anything of the sort when making dinner reservations, and I frequently make reservations at plenty of nice, upscale places.

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

#325

Post by positr0n »

tabs_masterrace wrote: post #283
tlrobinson wrote: post #191

Earlier 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?

Damn that sounds even more dystopian, can you imaging it "Hello how can I help you? - Hi, beep, I like to reserve a table? - Ok, beep, beep, on second - Mhm-mm beep, beep, sceech, 011000101010...."

Great comic on this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3576

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

#326

Post by itronitron »

macintux wrote: post #237
jstanley wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is "PM" more specific than "noon"? Absent the context of this conversation, it's not immediately obvious to me whether 12 PM is midday or midnight, where as "noon" is unambiguous.

I think historically "noon" expresses less precision, although I suspect that's less true now that everyone always knows what time it is and has GPS in their pocket to help calculate arrival times. 20 years ago, had I said to someone "I'll be there at 12pm" it would have had a stronger implication of precision than "I'll be there at noon." I don't think it's true today.

12pm is also commonly interpreted as midnight so "12 noon" or "12 midnight" is generally preferred when scheduling meetings or deadlines in order to avoid confusion.

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

#327

Post by stfwn »

freyir wrote: post #310
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…

> 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. And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.

A large part of introducing new tech is enabling the transition from existing tech. Maybe if we scrapped all old cars and allowed only autonomously vehicles we’d be be sleeping at 120 km/h next week. But some businesses still run on COBOL.

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

#328

Post by jonathanberger »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #324
batuhanicoz wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of deposits for reservations for a restaurant. And I've at least once made a reservation for restaurant with a Micheline star. I'm not sure if this is common practice at least in Europe. I'm sure it's unheard-of in Turkey (and I've been lucky enough to make reservations for some high end and/or very popular restaurants). May I ask in which countries you've experienced this in? I'm genuinely curious.

I travel all over the Us (Texas, NYC, and Cali mostly) and I've literally never had to put down any kind of deposit or anything of the sort when making dinner reservations, and I frequently make reservations at plenty of nice, upscale places.

It's common in San Francisco. Chubby Noodle is an example I booked today for a party of 8.

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

#329

Post by natch »

Web scraping is so yesterday.

This is the beginning of robots scraping the real world.

Most of the examples Google showed were crafted to make this look like a friendly agent acting on behalf of users.

But the more powerful use of this, as illustrated by the deemphasized "holiday hours" example, would be for Google to use it to get any information they wanted out of anybody the robots can call and conduct social engineering on.

Imagine coupling this with the knowledge available to someone able to read your gmail inbox.

  "Hey you sent us an email two days ago about A and B..."

  (trust is established)

  "Can you clear up whether you were interested more in A, or more in B?"
OK not the perfect script but you get the point.

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

#330

Post by adtac »

freyir wrote: post #310
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…

> 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. And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.

Lol imagine my phone talking with an automated customer service line. Two machines, talking to one another, not using any of the existing protocols. My phone would have a database of questions to ask, form it into an English sentence, run it through a text-to-speech, transmit this to the other phone. Their "phone" would run a speech-to-text, run NLP, match it with its own database, and do the whole thing again in the opposite direction.

This gives a whole new meaning to "all of UI/UX is basically prettifying database queries".

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