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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

#431

Post by heartbreak »

saagarjha wrote: post #370
Mizza wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess I should be sorry for bastardizing your language? But really, a conversation like the one you're looking for would be just as out-of-place in California as the one you saw in the article would be in England. It's important to match regional customs if you're trying to emulate and interact with humans.

I'm from the American southeast, and if anyone bastardized the English language it was us. When I listened to the recordings I cringed at how rude they sounded. If Google can build this thing, they can certainly adapt it to regional customs if they want to. Hopefully they do.

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

#432

Post by anonymous_ch »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #165
sp527 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology promises "wealth and leisure for all". The capital owners promise "it'll trickle down". Technical utopianists need to start tempering their optimism with the realities of human nature and design systems accordingly.

Average income and wealth has massively increased over the last century, so we are slowly but surely getting to that utopia. But it happens at a pace that is too slow to be experientially perceptible. I would add however that there does appear to be some barrier limiting the ability of ordinary people to accumulate financial capital, and I attribute that to friction/fixed-costs imposed by regulations. New services, l…

The average American eats better than kings from the past 2,000 years. Wealth and prosperity is 100% relative.

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

#433

Post by [deleted] »

wrinkl3 wrote: post #357
notatoad wrote: post #133

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

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

#434

Post by bigiain »

pbw wrote: post #411

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…

At least this might ease some of the pressure on the housing market in the Bay Area. By transferring minimum wage workers jobs from San Francisco restaurants and shops to datacenters in Northern Virginia and North East Oregon, we can free up valuable real estate for FANG workers struggling to find a room to rent within the budget of somebody earning only $250k per year...

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

#435

Post by zbentley »

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.

I wonder if that resilience is worth the immense amount of infrastructure and engineering that is spent on maintenance of the technical debt. Does that maintenance drive up processing fees? I suspect it does, but not in any amount sufficient to explain the size of those fees.

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

#436

Post by mrastro »

justonepost wrote: post #172
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 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.

If we accept your premise that bots become so close to humans that they are virtually indistinguishable, then at that point does it matter who the "person" on the other end of the line is? I'd argue it doesn't because the outcome would be the same.

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

#437

Post by mozumder »

pbw wrote: post #411

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…

Now I'm wondering what could be code-words to signal that they're AI and go into modem-mode...

"Hi there, I'd like to schedule an appointment" "Are you suuuure?" SCCREEECH KSHHH...

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

#438

Post by zbentley »

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.

...somewhere, Kevin Mitnick just smiled.

I like to think it was a smile of renewed relevance due to unbelievably poor technical decisions.

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

#439

Post by WalterSear »

discordance wrote: post #426
pbw wrote: post #411

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…

I do feel for them, but at the same time we have these unintentional designs and systems that cause a lot of suffering all over the place. 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.

I'm sure this system can and will be used to handle you on hold. ;) Be prepared for obfuscating phone trees that can talk back.

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

#440

Post by bigiain »

mozumder wrote: post #437
pbw wrote: post #411

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…

Now I'm wondering what could be code-words to signal that they're AI and go into modem-mode... "Hi there, I'd like to schedule an appointment" "Are you suuuure?" SCCREEECH KSHHH ...

And the secret knowledge that a specific whistle from a cereal box - blown into the phone at just the right time - can land you a Saturday night reservation at French Laundry.
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