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

Post by newsbinator » Wed, May 09, 2018, 6:00 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #510

Andre_Wanglin wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this won't be used by people of all classes? And did you hear the recordings? The AI is better at conversation than the humans it had to deal with. I would gladly use this to avoid talking to people who can't parse a plain sentence without rounds of repetition and clarification.

AI tools, including Google's Duplex, will benefit the bottom ~90% of the planet radically more than it will benefit the wealthy. That has been true of nearly all technology from the past few hundred years at least. The wealthy will largely continue employing humans to do tasks for them, because they can. It will be just another form of luxury / status. An AI assistant will be considered beneath their class. The techn…

Post by icebraining » Wed, May 09, 2018, 6:05 AM UTC

sgslo wrote: post #250

jokh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"? The former (booking a table) is much more "constrained", as in the conversation would most likely not go into much of a tangent, because there are only so many responses to a statement like "book a table for four at 8pm" (8pm is full,…

And you think this is the end of innovation, this is it, no improvements from here? Duplex is interacting with a human and that person has no idea its a computer on the other end. Yes, Duplex is limited as it stands, but what is there to make you think something as described in grandparent post won't exist in ten years?

Post by lallysingh » Wed, May 09, 2018, 6:10 AM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #513

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.

Post by halflings » Wed, May 09, 2018, 6:12 AM UTC

DecayingOrganic wrote: post #246

mithr wrote: post #166

This is amazing, but one thing I don't really understand is this: earlier in the presentation, they demoed some new Google Assistant voices. All of them sound like standard computer-synthesized assistants. On the other hand, the synthesized Duplex voices sound indistinguishable from human speech to me, even without the "disfluencies" they include. If Google has gotten speech synthesis to this point, why isn't Assista…

This is simply because Google Duplex's TTS engine is using Tacotron and WaveNet which are not ready for general use yet .

Post by imnotadoctor999 » Wed, May 09, 2018, 6:16 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #521

stormbrew wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.