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

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491–500 of 786 posts

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

#491
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or cancelling your cable.

Or monitronics account

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was attempting to communicate to the parent and grandparent that transcribing/parsing english and communication are different. We both need to share the model being spoken of to transfer or communicate the knowledge.

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

#494
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…

Maybe it'll motivate more businesses to put more of their transactional things online where the bot can do it without bothering a real human, and real humans who don't want to use this can also avoid spending more time on the phone than they have to.

Honestly, the degree to which telephone calls are still necessary in day to day life is absurd. If this hastens their demise then I'm all for it.

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like we'll have to start solving voice captchas just to call businesses.

Has anybody found a way/hack to bypass Recaptcha ?

Yes, which is why over time it has gotten progressively more difficult. I find some of the challenges to be almost impossible. (Also why Google started using yout session with them to bypass the captcha automatically, it would be too frustrating of an experience otherwise)

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

#496
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…

Don't worry. They'll still get calls from plenty of people who aren't sure what they're looking for, don't have any manners, or are hard to hear on their speaker/car phones.

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

#497
post #481
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…

As someone who worked in tech support early in their career, I do not. The entire process of fielding calls is terrible. You never know what's waiting for you when you pick up the phone. Could be someone with a terrible attitude that wants to take it out on you. I had coworkers who got PTSD, and a ringing phone would trigger it. I would rather talk to a rational robot on the phone than a possibly irate human who, fra…

Well, it'll start sucking when they call back to cancel because the robot found a better appointment.

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

#498
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…

The store is still getting the customer, the retail rep is still getting the same call. What's so horrifying? I see this as leveling the playing field -- upper middle class people can already afford real assistants a la Tim Ferris; this just lets everyone access it.

Is it not conceivable that the rep would eventually replaced with a like kind system?

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

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what is a 4 star restaurant given that the Micheline guide gives maximum 3 stars, but pretty much all starred restaurants want a deposit when reserving. If seriously there was someone dumb enough to do something like this, booking and cancelling continuously restaurants, then probably everyone would require a deposit when reserving and the deposit would be much bigger than today.

I've never heard of deposits for reservations for a restaurant. And I've at least once made a reservation for restaurant with a Micheline star. I'm not sure if this is common practice at least in Europe. I'm sure it's unheard-of in Turkey (and I've been lucky enough to make reservations for some high end and/or very popular restaurants). May I ask in which countries you've experienced this in? I'm genuinely curious.

Italy, France, uk. Some of them were not even starred.

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

#500
post #310

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.

Google Duplex is just a backwards compatibility shim...
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