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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

#441

Post by annexrichmond »

I already had a comment above about this but another thing I thought of that I don't see anyone discussing:

What is the purpose of trying to fool the business owner into thinking it's a real person? It seems unethical, dishonest and disrespectful to the receiver having them believe they are talking to a real person. In the case of an AI failure at least the receiver will understand what's going on instead of becoming really confused. Sometimes I feel people in SV are oblivious to how their software can affect real human beings.

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

#442

Post by blt »

Tracist wrote: post #371
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.

There are already apps/technologies that transmit information through audio at frequencies not audible to humans. It should be trivial to adapt this so that if two AI systems are interacting they can perform an "AI-handshake" in the audio at the start and then switch to a more efficient form of communication.

but audio telephony equipment generally assumes the signal is in the human vocal range, right?

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

#443

Post by fkistner »

I wonder, if this will be confined to one-party consent states/countries for the foreseeable future.

Google will most likely want to use recordings to keep fine-tuning and improving upon Duplex, and I don't see them announcing "This call is recorded by Google.", when they're going through such great lengths to convince the called parties that they are talking with a human being.

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

#444

Post by tim333 »

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.

Phoning like this you already have to wonder if the person on the end is an idiot who will screw stuff up. I'm not sure it maybe being a google bot will make much difference.

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

#445

Post by zbentley »

avinium wrote: post #322
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.

If you ever needed proof of the negativity in the tech community, this thread is it. Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".

One time, a giant tech company staffed by geniuses released a super-useful tool that saw massive adoption. 10 years later that tool became technical debt.

Wait, it was way less than 10 years.

I'm talking about Google Realtime. Or reader? Or buzz?

No, wait, I'm talking about aggressive Twitter API deprecation/removal.

Wait, nevermind, I'm talking about Facebook.

You get the idea. What's revolutionary today sometimes becomes the substrate for future innovation. Sometimes it gets cast by the wayside, even in the face of significant "user" (developer) popularity.

That's not proof of negativity; just realism. Negativity would be "no new innovation will ever get traction". Optimism would be "all new technologies will change the world" (c.f. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended). This is neither.

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

#446

Post by tim333 »

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…

In the second example they ask what's the line likely to be like on Wednesday. Show me one API that does that. English is richer than APIs.

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

#448

Post by sowbug »

collinmanderson wrote: post #416
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…

Re businesses doing this today: I believe WeChat handles this very well in China.

It reminds me of the maybe apocryphal story how NASA invested time, money, and effort to develop a pen so astronauts could write in zero gravity, and the Soviets used pencils.

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

#449

Post by MichaelGG »

jfv wrote: post #396
MichaelGG wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But I am saying that it is unlikely Google will let you spam reservations. This idea that some kid will now be able to make 1000 reservations via Google is not probable.

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

#450

Post by asfasgasg »

state_less wrote: post #408
madrox wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild

True, many people know english, but that doesn't mean they know statistics or some other complex domain. "Show me a k-means cluster of this dataset", is likely to be parsed but not understood by many english speakers.

Fortunately, Duplex's purpose is booking salon appointments, not to provide a conversation partner about statistical theory.
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