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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

#341

Post by cpeterso »

gowld wrote: post #51
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

Never have we had a more clear example of why Google needs to be regulated, and laws against what they're doing needs to be passed. The fact that they think it's okay to have bots pretending to be human making phone calls, shortly after demonstrating how quickly they can copy someone's voice (re: John Legend), it shows a blatant disregard for what they're creating.

Is it illegal for my secretary or father to make an appointment for me?

Does your secretary or father pretend to be you when making the appointment? Google Duplex is pretending to be a human without the knowledge or permission of the person on the other end of the call.

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

#342

Post by StavrosK »

ecwilson wrote: post #338
tomaskafka wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this one https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13184491-avogadro-corp

Oh god that sounds awful. One of the reviews has all the spoilers. It's truly stupid.

Yeah, it was pretty badly written and rather simplistic. Not recommended, you're probably better off reading the spoilered review.

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

#344

Post by 2bitencryption »

ghayes wrote: post #300
jfaucett wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision. well, in semantics/pragmatics these discourse particles are often not deficiencies at all. They are signals with practical semantic purpose. "hmms" and "uhs" can signal attentiveness, turn-taking (turn holding, turn yielding, etc), agreement - just to name a few. For any machine system to be able to pass as human, it will have to be able to control the…

I really enjoyed the machine's "uhs" and "uhms" in the demo speech. However, I felt the "uh-huh"s sounded forced. It's funny how these subtleties are very important in human conversation.

I think probably because "uh-huh" can have many different meanings based on inflection!

As a "non-word", it relies heavily on how it is conveyed.

Imagine someone asks you a question, I bet you can answer using just the word "uh-huh" but conveying these different emotions:

rude, perky, bored, upset, annoyed, dubious, excited

and probably a dozen more.

Even using the "perky" or "happy" one in a situation where it isn't warranted might sound rude or unthoughtful!

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

#345

Post by TaylorAlexander »

loceng wrote: post #204
Klathmon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. They pointed out during the presentation that the system could call once to a business and get the hours, then allow hundreds or thousands of users to see that without bothering the business again. Assuming it works, it could save a significant amount of time for some places. >If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant. Th…

This works only if Google allows that same data to be used by other businesses who would benefit from having it listed.

Technically it works as long as most users use Google, but I agree it would work better if they share the data!

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

#346

Post by tomludus »

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.

This really made me laugh. You are also totally right, we have better solutions to this problem already.

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

#347

Post by cpeterso »

silverlake wrote: post #89

I want to use this to fight spam calls.

People have already had good success engaging telemarketers with much more primitive robots. Here are some funny samples on YouTube:

Lenny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgT44DuIaAM&list=PLduL71_GKz...

Jolly Roger: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm-hnvBm9Q

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

#348

Post by cpeterso »

erdo wrote: post #262

Sigh, guess it won't be long before we're all asked to jump through some ludicrous human challenge to confirm we are not a robot every time we call someone

I wonder how voice captchas will work. This is inevitable. :)

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

#349

Post by d--b »

THIS FUCKING SUCKS.

I don't care the awesome technical achievement. The fact that I believe that I am talking to a real person but I am not is the worst.

Can I call the restaurant and say:"well actually my wife doesn't like being cold so I'm not sure the terrace is going to work tonight" and have the computer answer something completely random is just so bad.

The problem is not that the computer doesn't sound natural. The problem is that it cannot deal with out of script requests. In fact the more natural it sounds the more dumb it makes the system appear!

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

#350

Post by turdnagel »

hrasyid wrote: post #213
ErikAugust wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You're completely abstracting away all the coding, integration, testing, and "data formatting" (read: grammar) involved in Duplex, which seems to be much more complex than an REST API.
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