591–600 of 786 posts
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Potentially there would be a way for both sides to recognize that the other side is a machine and they could switch to binary communication.
Binary communication isn't useful by itself. You need a compatible protocol and API. I can give you 010101010101101011111 to a machine all I want, if they don't know how it's formatted, it's useless. Conversational English is a format.
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…
As long as there's a way out of the AVR system... too often, you get trapped when you want something that isn't an option.
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> 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…
Also if it was unknown whether the opposing person was a bot, a bot could firstly send a common test according to some protocol to ask if the other one was bot by some kind of sound representing that. In which case both would start sending machine readable information to each-other.
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> 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…
It has been a nightmare to deal with chatbots and voice-synthesized phone "customer support" gatekeepers. It's time to turn the tables. This doesn't have to only apply to restaurants and such, much better to let this loose on the various unresponsive megacorps. Who knows, they may find it less costly to actually deal with customers than pay for compute against a worthy adversary.
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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.
I travel all over the Us (Texas, NYC, and Cali mostly) and I've literally never had to put down any kind of deposit or anything of the sort when making dinner reservations, and I frequently make reservations at plenty of nice, upscale places.
Funny enough they also use OpenTable, so no need for this Google stuff — just use the API or book through the site. You can also call them if for some reason that is preferable.
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…
Instead, I would change your analogies to real bot/human problems today, such as phone bots scamming individuals for millions[1], or an older problem – email spam.
Basically any platform with a large imbalance in the effort (time/money/labor) spent by two sides (scammer/scammed in my example above) can be abused. But it can also be used for very good things. So we can't make blanket statements about these things.
Captchas and other bot filters are built to balance out the effort ratio so that abuse becomes more costly, and I'm sure if either Google or other companies abuse robocalls, people will have to respond with similar measures. But it's not a new problem, and if Google plays their cards right they may actually reduce the volume of calls that don't lead to business, while maintaining or increasing the volume of calls that do lead to business.
[1] For example, the 212-XXXX-XXX robocalls in NY state, which I'm daily exposed to due to their prevalence: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-chinese-roboc...
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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…
If both sides were to use Duplex, it would already know to just send 1010 instead of verbal communications. Also if it was unknown whether the opposing person was a bot, a bot could firstly send a common test according to some protocol to ask if the other one was bot by some kind of sound representing that. In which case both would start sending machine readable information to each-other.
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This works only if Google allows that same data to be used by other businesses who would benefit from having it listed.
Technically it works as long as most users use Google, but I agree it would work better if they share the data!
A few observations: * In the example where Google asked about holiday hours -- they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info. Interesting thought experiment is Google validating their reviews/business listings by actually calling businesses and speaking to a real human. * This is going to be fantastic for accessibility. Maybe I struggle t…
> 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…