Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ai.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 786 posts

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

#521

Post by sametmax »

stormbrew wrote: post #494
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…

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.

Phone calls are necessary for anything that needs flexibility.

Coding flexibility in a website is incredibly hard.

Think about it. A restaurant doesn't have anything veggie on the menu, a last minute guest arrives and is veggie. You call to ask if there is something that can be done.

It's possible to code that, but it's a lot of work to get all the scenarios right.

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

#522

Post by adamsea »

sametmax wrote: post #515
madrox wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

... well it won't add to the PTSD at least unless they design the robots to lose their temper. Kind of agree about the loss of social skills.

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

#524

Post by nyanotech »

bbleciel wrote: post #362
adtac wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol imagine my phone talking with an automated customer service line. Two machines, talking to one another, not using any of the existing protocols. My phone would have a database of questions to ask, form it into an English sentence, run it through a text-to-speech, transmit this to the other phone. Their "phone" would run a speech-to-text, run NLP, match it with its own database, and do the whole thing again in the…

"all of UI/UX is basically prettifying database queries" - are you saying that generally speaking or is that a reference an article or articles? Would love to read more about it if so-

Pretty sure this is just the idea behind MVC.

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

#525

Post by dragonwriter »

nyanotech wrote: post #516
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…

> 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.

Healthcare uses faxes mostly because HIPAA rules particular to format and security of electronic communications don't apply to faxes; it's a compliance hack.

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

#527

Post by Tsagadai »

punnerud wrote: post #148
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…

To save CPU/GPU/TPU there should be a high-frequency sound, as in people can’t hear, so the computers talking to each other and switch to a faster way to communicate. If this is included you also have way to detect if you are talking to a bot/duplex.

Why not just a pattern of umms and arrs that it already seems to add into output. Easier to detect for it and harder for a human to recognise.

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

#528

Post by spiderfarmer »

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…

I had a company for 15 years and I still hate it when the phone rings. Phone calls were always messing up whatever I had planned for the day and it made it harder to get shit done.

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

#529

Post by novos »

theptip wrote: post #257
Paul-ish wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose. This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. This time commitment asymmetry will be the issue with these systems. Like emai…

> If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant. Or being forced to use for Google's small business version of Duplex to handle the increased call load (for a small fee of course).

Knowing google. There will likely be a free tier and then higher tiers that handle multiple phone lines, complex call routing and eventually customer service case handling.

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

#530

Post by cma »

Mizza wrote: post #228

Besides creeping dystopia of it, I find this aesthetically disgusting most of all. If you listen to the sample call, the computer voice sounds incredibly _rude_, at least to my ears, especially at the end of the call. I would never speak to a service employee that way. I try to always say a clear and proper please and thank you, and would never ever want a robot to subject somebody to an"uhhhhh, thanks " on my behalf…

Mechanizing manners is just as creepy. Chik-fil-a employees aren't allowed to say "you're welcome", they have to respond to every expression of gratitude with the phrase, "My pleasure."
Post reply on HN