There's a far-future sci-fi novel where "please" and "thank you" are considered insults when spoken to people...bc that's how the wealthy prefaced and ended their computer commands. Vinge, perhaps?
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
391–400 of 786 posts
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can trust that they have the private key corresponding the public key you associate with that entity.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#393The 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…
You gotta be kidding. If it was that easy why didn't you build it yourself? Easy billion right there.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls, so I think the reverse of this duplex system, a more natural voice booking system for small businesses would help the immensely free up their workers to focus on customers. I think this perspective is very short sighted. You will lose customers to automation, but businesses wont turn away customers b…
Uh...businesses have been automating phone calls for decades now
Thats partially my point. Everyone is thinking about the business case for cost saving around automation for businesses, but that lacks imagination. Automation tools for consumers to interact with humans at businesses is where the real opportunity lies.
Would you ever voluntarily use an IVR? I wouldn't. If I am going to interact with automation for a business, I want to do it with a different interface than voice... all the hype around NLP and chatbots was uninspired and focused on the wrong side of the interaction... Building conversational interfaces for consumers to use to interact with businesses is a much better use case.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#395It’s funny to me that most places where you can make any kind of appointment online usually have a captcha. I wonder if they’ll start having a verbal captcha on phone calls.
great comment. Imagine the person on the other line saying... what? what verbal captcha a system like this could not answer?
What do you feel if I step on your foot?
Do roses smell good?
Even if the name is not "rose"?
What's the color of melancholy?
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#396I feel like this is going to make the world even flakier than it already is. If I can waste people's time without even the few minutes it normally takes to make a phone call, what's to stop a restauranteur from effectively denial-of-service attacking competing restaurants, or what's to stop me from booking 100 dinners for Friday evening because I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to want to eat (or who I'm going to t…
What stops a restauranteur from abusing Google's Gmail service? Presumably Google won't allow you to do spam with Duplex either. If you are going to be more enterprising then you can already do this. Just put some HITs on Mechanical Turk and let them place calls. Should cost you a few bucks to flood hundreds of calls.
I don't need reservations that badly. But the difference between having to specify Mechanical Turk work and just talking to a Google appliance is pretty huge... We're talking hours vs. minutes of work.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not unaware of this concern. From the article: > The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right appr…
So they indicate that they are aware of the problem - and instead of doing a straight-forward "hey, I'm a bot", their suggested strategies are "being clear about the intent of the call" and "experiment with the right approach over the coming months"? To me that quote sounds more like a polite way of saying they definitely won't reveal to callers that they are talking with a bot than them taking the concern seriously.…
People are prejudiced against talking to bots because of how bad they are currently. I despise calling services that have voice recognition, often times it's easier to have an options menu.
If they can get a way of saying "I'm a bot" without people hanging up the calls, I'm all for it -- otherwise, "I'm calling for a client" or similar is the best for everyone involved (assuming everything works).
Businesses also need to have a way to report problems to Google, like if they are getting spammed by Duplex or want to opt out.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#398There'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…
To be honest, perhaps a temporary self-imposed technological dark age wouldn't be such a terrible thing
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 be…
English, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this. So basically the old school modem sound, but in frequency that can't be heard. It would only take a fraction of a second to send out the feeler, and would not be noticed if a live human picked up. Could even detect a human and send the call over to a live representative without anyone noticing.
It doesn't have to be out of frequency (since that's probably filtered anyway), could be just a really quick burst handshake identifier which could encode an IP address to communicate over instead of a crummy phone line. Duplex: (I'm available to chat) Other bot: (Oh hai! Wanna get intimate?) Duplex: (Come find me on duplex://64.233.160.0)
No, let's make it fun. "How can I help you?" "Get off the phone you damn bot!" "Why I oughta..."