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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

#511

Post by tsbertalan »

cpeterso wrote: post #341
gowld wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it illegal for my secretary or father to make an appointment for me?

Does your secretary or father pretend to be you when making the appointment? Google Duplex is pretending to be a human without the knowledge or permission of the person on the other end of the call.

One of the samples claimed to be an agent acting on the behalf of a client. Google says they're still deciding on the best format for these calls--here's hoping they take the criticism of people like you into account, and go with something like that example.

Of course, I don't really see why there needs to be an attempt to pass as human at all. It would be fine with me if they just reinvented the phone tree with a better ux. Especially since it's billed as a business-facing call.

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

#512

Post by icebraining »

luckydata wrote: post #393
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…

You gotta be kidding. If it was that easy why didn't you build it yourself? Easy billion right there.

cromwellan didn't say it was easy. It's still hard to do something limited.

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

#513

Post by thisisit »

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…

For me, the money quote is:

> Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains.

The question becomes - How many people will really have the time and money to actually collect data to allow Duplex to take over. It might be true for large call centers but difficult at individual level.

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

#515

Post by sametmax »

madrox wrote: post #481
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…

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…

It's not going to replace. It's going to add to.

First because it will fail a lot, as robot won't understand specifics such as what items on the menu do you want, oh but it's missing, do you want this instead.

And then you will multiply commercial calls, and spam mails will arrive on the phone.

Then people will abuse it to harass, annoy, attack competition, etc. Spam a restaurant with robot phone calls for a month and it's done.

Plus google will analyse all this data, because it doesn't know enough about you.

It's a nigthmare.

But it will be excellent for anybody with social skills. What i learn living in africa is that we became handicaped because we can avoid talking to other humans so much. Going back to france, my social, sexual and work life improved a lot because i had basically zero competition. The next generations will really suck at the game.

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

#516

Post by nyanotech »

ZainRiz wrote: post #381
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, 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…

> It's the lack of a universal API.

This sort of thing is exactly why the healthcare industry still uses faxes, even going electronic charts -> pdf -> fax -> pdf -> electronic charts in some cases.

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

#517

Post by nyanotech »

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.

Optional functionality :P

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

#518

Post by adventured »

zshprompt wrote: post #453
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…

The working class people will be replaced by AI

The productivity gains from AI will make new jobs possible and will free up capital to be deployed in new economic creation. That is a cycle that has been essentially non-stop for the last 200-300 years (particularly aggressive and accelerating in that time frame). As populations decline and population growth stagnates, we won't have anywhere near enough people to fill the job openings in the future. The working class will benefit extraordinarily from the AI boom, it will raise their wages, it will produce an immense bounty of new jobs that will mostly go unfilled and it will drastically improve their standard of living.

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

#519

Post by sametmax »

jorblumesea wrote: post #451
WalterSear wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Precisely, the implications of this are just AIs getting stuck in a recursive loop or getting into a battle of training to best the other.

Exactly. People think it will be used for better service. It won't. It will he used to save money. At the expense of the human. When was the last time you were satisfied with a web site help page ? They usually suck big time. They have zero way to help you on your specific situation.

I would feel infuriated to have to talk to a robot making me waste my time. At least during a waiting song I can put the speakers on and do something else.

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

#520

Post by nyanotech »

sowbug wrote: post #448
collinmanderson wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pencils have the disadvantage of putting out conductive graphite dust, which, in 0g, will float around for a very long time.
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