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

Post by WhiteNoiz3 » Wed, May 09, 2018, 1:18 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #399

ZainRiz wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by ChristianGeek » Wed, May 09, 2018, 1:28 AM UTC

adtac wrote: post #330

freyir wrote: post #310

Earlier 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 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…

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, May 09, 2018, 1:32 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #225

danpalmer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re totally right. However while this is useful to bootstrap a new technology rollout, 10 years on its just technical debt. The amount of tech debt in the system behind credit cards is crazy, because originally charges where phoned in to the card issuer manually, and everything from then on - magstripe, chip & PIN, online only transactions, etc, has all been built on top, and the leaky abstractions show through in…

On the other hand, the credit card system's backcompat does mean that you can still accept credit cards when the power's out. You just write down the number (or use an imprint machine) and let the customer go. And the semantics of credit mean that you can still make that charge even if an online transaction would have resulted in a decline—offline transactions are never declined, they just cause overdrafts.

Post by s73v3r_ » Wed, May 09, 2018, 1:38 AM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #281

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…

That end game seems very wasteful and Rube Goldbergian. Why use an 1800s technology as the transport layer when salons, yoga studios, and more already use things like MindBody, which already has an appointments API? I’d honestly be way more interested if this integrated with MindBody, OpenTable, DMV websites, car dealer appointment systems, medical office scheduling systems — all of which already have APIs or at leas…

Post by pbw » Wed, May 09, 2018, 1:50 AM UTC