421–430 of 786 posts
This is really horrifying to me. My heart goes out to the working-class retail people who are going to have to spend their days chatting with the AI assistants of upper middle class people too busy to call themselves. If the shop owner gets a duplex system to field the calls, then the two robots can subtly signal to the other they aren't actually human, and then start shrieking like a 9600 baud modem to finish the di…
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…
Is this satire? If this is indeed the future, I wonder if there is an irresistible urge to make systems as inefficient as possible. Kind of "like gases expand to fill the container, applications become as inefficient as the power of the hardware allows".
This is really horrifying to me. My heart goes out to the working-class retail people who are going to have to spend their days chatting with the AI assistants of upper middle class people too busy to call themselves. If the shop owner gets a duplex system to field the calls, then the two robots can subtly signal to the other they aren't actually human, and then start shrieking like a 9600 baud modem to finish the di…
... software engineers have to make good bots
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn that sounds even more dystopian, can you imaging it "Hello how can I help you? - Hi, beep, I like to reserve a table? - Ok, beep, beep, on second - Mhm-mm beep, beep, sceech, 011000101010...."
This is basically what 56k modems do, isn't it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unfortunate that in 2018 we still have to resort to klugey work arounds like this with so many restaurants and hair salons instead of being able to make reservations online. There are services like OpenTable but even here in Silicon Valley only a small minority of restaurants use them. It seems like there's a huge opportunity if someone can crack the market.
I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to picking up the phone and talking to someone.
"I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to looking up directions to wherever they're driving before they get in the car."
"I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to paying their bills every month."
"I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to carrying cash around and counting change."
"I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to coming over and talking in person."
"I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to washing their dishes by hand."
"I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to doing long division."
This is really horrifying to me. My heart goes out to the working-class retail people who are going to have to spend their days chatting with the AI assistants of upper middle class people too busy to call themselves. If the shop owner gets a duplex system to field the calls, then the two robots can subtly signal to the other they aren't actually human, and then start shrieking like a 9600 baud modem to finish the di…
For example, I was kept on hold for 2 hours the other day to try and sort out being double charged on my bankcard. If this sort of service can handle hold, then i'm in.
"To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data. The network uses the output of Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, as well as features from the audio, the history of the conversation, the parameters of the conversation (e.g. the desired service for an appointment, or the current time of day) and more."
"Anonymized!" "Honest!" says the surveillance-capitalism advertising mega corp...
Luckily I've never been able to use Google Voice - but I doubt they're the only threat actor using phone conversations and metadata to train neural nets... Pretend anonymized or not...
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 problem is that computers will now be interacting with people and people will become unsure of whether they are taking to a computer or a person. It will create a bewildering world full of mistrust. I would argue that there should be a law proclaiming that computers must identify themselves.
I hang up on robocalls now... I guarantee this service is going to get hung up on more than it will work. People don't like getting treated like crap at home, why do we need to treat them like crap at work.
This 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!