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…
> they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info 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 pl…
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
351–360 of 786 posts
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#352The 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?
They could have, but it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun, and they wouldn't have learned nearly as much.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#353Besides creeping dystopia of it, I find this aesthetically disgusting most of all. 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…
Looking forward to the Irish version of the closing.
Would probably sound like this:
-Bye now
-Bye
-Bye bye b-b-bye
[...]
This being said, good luck with the accents, the flat Californian is probably a good playground.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#354The 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 doesn't even need to happen on the voice connection. A register of "does this number map to a known system" would be enough. Then it's just up to common APIs.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The spam factor can go the other way too. Imagine the same type of program automating the spam / scam calls to the elderly.
Yeah, the phone lines getting that polluted is not a pleasant prospect.
This conversation reminds me of "Lenny", a simple bot someone created to talk pointlessly in circles with telemarketers for hours until they hang up in frustration.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info 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 pl…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
" Business model
Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching. "
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#357This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!
Either that, or it will train people to stop trusting a phone call as some sort of authentication. The whole social engineering problem is that when somebody gets a phone call, they trust that the person at the other end is who they say they are. Which can be a false assumption. When the robots start calling, maybe people will finally stop making that assumption automatically.
So what can you trust? The person calling you might be a simulated voice, crafted to sound like someone you know. The person texting/DMing/emailing you might be an attacker pretended to be someone you know. You can put trust in things like PGP, but they're sparsely adopted and still leave a huge attack surface.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#358Besides creeping dystopia of it, I find this aesthetically disgusting most of all. 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…
That's how most people I know would make a reservation…
Exactly, and you're from California. You see this as normal. I'm from England. What Californians see as normal, or casual , or "chill", I think we see as being rude. I think this is extends in personal interactions, professional interactions and customer/company relations like this one.
I imagine that if I used this service to place an order to a restaurant, it would order with the Californian "cannIgettuhh", which I would be scalded for as a child. I find it very ugly and I hope that this isn't forced upon the rest of the world. But really, it's just one facet of the way technology is destroying a lot of interpersonal respect.
One can even imagine this "deficient design" being taken to it's logical conclusion with the inclusion of belching, grunts, and other inconsiderate bodily sounds.
The other poster says not to worry, surely the engineers will be more considerate about other cultures and customs when deploying this technology to the world, but I think that's incredibly naive considering this company's track record.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#359Earlier 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’ve had reservations at upscale places in LA ask for a credit card up front and threaten a fee if I were to no-show, and some places have minimums for premium tables (e.g. 71Above window tables). A deposit up front doesn’t seem too far out of the question.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#360Oh, look, it's Clippy all over again.
No thanks.