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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

#381

Post by ZainRiz »

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, but if you think about it, what stops businesses from doing this today?

It's the lack of a universal API.

If a barber shop wants to make it possible for a 3rd party app to book appointments then they have to release some API. But that's not the end of it. The 3rd party app has to first discover their Api, someone has to understand it and write code to use it, and then deploy that code.

This is a problem today because there is no universal Api that all services can use

With Duplex, verbals speech becomes a universal Api that every service can parse and communicate to each other wtih. Also, the discoverability is taken care of by using publicly cataloged phone numbers on services like Google Maps, Yelp, etc

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

#382

Post by dcbadacd »

scarmig wrote: post #219
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Instead of a single, clean restaurant reservation HTTP POST API, the future is two neural nets modulating and demodulating the request to and from inexact and potentially ambiguous English audio.

Silly. The future is a stenographic handshake in the initial greeting, which negotiates an upgrade to a proprietary gRPC8 protocol when the caller and recipient are both Google, which Google uses to get a monopoly on telephone-mediated social interactions which it can then monetize by building a social graph to more efficiently target advertising to captive audiences riding Waymo cars.

You are joking, but it's not funny in the future. :S

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

#383

Post by ZainRiz »

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…

As crazy as it seems at first glance, a double Duplex system would be a really beneficial result.

What stops businesses from setting up Apis from scheduling services today? It's the lack of a universal API.

If a barber shop wants to make it possible for a 3rd party app to book appointments then they have to release some API. But that's not the end of it. The 3rd party app has to first discover their Api, someone has to understand it and write code to use it, and then deploy that code.

I'll repeat for emphasis: This is mainly a problem today because there is no universal Api that all services can use

With Duplex, verbals speech becomes a universal Api that every service can parse and communicate to each other with. Also, the discoverability is taken care of by using publicly cataloged phone numbers on services like Google Maps, Yelp, etc

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

#384

Post by ZainRiz »

ErikAugust wrote: post #203
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…

"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?

It's not just about the user. There's no open, universally agreed upon booking system API...except for human voice.

This is creating a natural-language based booking API that any system or business can tap into

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

#385

Post by L_226 »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

Similar to lens flares in (first person) video games.

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

#386

Post by ZainRiz »

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…

Also, in the WeChat model, everyone is tied to WeChat and can't go around it.

This voice based model can be integrated into any existing system. It already has the network effect going for it and it's not tied to the fate of any one company

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

#387

Post by empath75 »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #292
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.

Please go and convince the mom and pop hardware store or bakery in your town to use an API instead of answering the phone.

They’ll do that before getting a robot to answer the phone for them.

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

#388

Post by empath75 »

cromwellian wrote: post #164
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.

Where did I say it’s trivial? What I’m saying is, people ar anthropomorphizing and extrapolating what this system is doing far above what it is actually doing, and then using it to justify fears that Skynet’s around the corner. This system can’t pass the Turing test, it would be fooled probably by a simple question about itself or a subject outside the domain, like the kind of food you like. You’ve got people in this…

I think it passes a limited Turing test at the domain it’s trained in. I doubt any of the people on the other end of the call would even suspect it’s a computer. That’s an amazing achievement.

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

#390

Post by amasad »

bo1024 wrote: post #280

I 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.

I agree with that. I think it's time for us, the tech industry, to start thinking about the ethical implications of the things we build before we release them.

To make this salient for people: imagine this technology being deployed for political robocalls. An attractive voice masquerading as a person persuading people to vote for someone.

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