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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

#571

Post by aembleton »

bsder wrote: post #554
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 problem is that I don't want more voice; I want less voice and more automation. I don't want to have to interact with a human because the only time a company makes me interact with a human is when they think it benefits them (upsell, make leaving difficult, etc.). What I want are good ways for me to handle this stuff via computer without human interaction.

Well, now Google can provide you with the HumanHuman interaction and then give you the automation and computer interface.

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

#572

Post by sedatk »

baalimago wrote: post #570

This is cool and all, but why not use a web booking system? (yes, i'm partly serious. Why engage in developing an area of technology where there's a much more elegant and efficient solution?)

could it be for those who don’t have one?

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

#573

Post by newsbinator »

mxfh wrote: post #561
newsbinator wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine A extends the "hellooo" out to exactly 1.32 seconds, with a 1.32 second pause between that and the next word. Machine B responds with a greeting exactly 1.32 seconds long, with a 1.32 second pause after it. Machine A responds with a sentence in which the first word is exactly 1.32 seconds long. Machine B considers the handshake a success and proceeds in machine language.

Oh dear, polyglot to audio steganographic phone calls, the audible message doesnt even has to be the same then the one encoded in microgaps and envelope shifts and all kind of modulations.

That's right- I started thinking about it because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16046329

Surely someone out there is doing audio steganography by modulating the volume/duration of "silence".

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

#574

Post by bm1362 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #560
nyanotech wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is even more fun because in the modern age, what very often ends up happening is: electronic charts -> pdf -> fax -> fax machine as a service -> unsecured email -> pdf -> electronic charts Compliance can sometimes help, but ultimately the data needs to flow, and people will do whatever it takes to make that happen. Until security is so easy that it's the default, these little loopholes will continue to be abused…

To be fair, you’ll notice if 150 million faxes start going off rather than someone breaking abusing your API.

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

#575

Post by lozenge »

EGreg wrote: post #97
542458 wrote: post #13

This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!

So you simply tell google a cookie that it would keep safe, to prove it’s google when calling. Presumably it wouldn’t be on speakerphone at the time. Have you ever wondered the same thing about your favorite OS’s admin credentials dialog? What if an app spoofs it?

On Windows, there's a group policy to require Ctrl-Alt-Del before the UAC prompt asks for your password. It's impossible for an application to hijack that key combination.

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

#576

Post by krtkush »

thisisit wrote: post #546
lallysingh wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every call center in the world is now looking to sell their recordings.

Curious, where can someone buy these recordings?

Most call center save recordings for "Training and internal purposes".

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

#577

Post by eric-hu »

bambax wrote: post #557

Google itself (Google Search) is extremely wary of being used by "bots" and uses string of captchas to screen them out. But search is just a machine. That Google would create bots to talk to real people is horrifying. This is only possible if Google doesn't in fact think of working people answering the phone, as really human. This is like doing war with drones instead of soldiers. This may sound over the top, but bea…

> The implicit contract in war is that soldiers are legally authorized to kill because they are risking their own life. Killing people at a distance without risking anyone's life on the side of the shooters, breaks that "contract", is fundamentally unfair and fuels terrorism, because terrorism is the only possible answer.

I don't think there's any sort of human risk contract like that in war. Wars fought entirely between human armies still produce spite on opposing sides.

Going back to your point about calls, humans and machines call me to ask for polling information, telemarketing, etcetera. I'm not okay with them wasting my time, whether they're human or machine. However, I'll tolerate it below a threshold as part of the costs of having a communication channel. Beyond that threshold I would consider alternate measures like changing my phone number, getting rid of my phone, or paying for a screening machine or service.

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

#578

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Much of the "semantic web" work was directed at similar things. The reason we don't have it already after 20 years of web commerce is that it's an adversarial process. The business wants to mislead, upsell, or discourage a customer from asking for support; and likewise some small fraction of customers are looking to exploit the business.

Bots that automate UI tend to get banned.

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

#580

Post by cm2187 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #565
Lorkki wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a bit too juicy to be true. Any citations?

I've literally been in the room when legal and compliance offices gave the advice on both the construction of the relevant regulations and industry practices on which a payer relied on in deciding to use a process that created paper documents then faxed them for certain purposes, but, no, there's nothing published I can link to as to that being the reason industry players make that decision. I can, however, point you…

And in a way it is justified, you need a warrant to wiretap a phone line but no such constraint on eavesdropping on TCP/IP communication.
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