I’m wondering about the legal implications of such feature. By making calls and reservations for the customer, does Google Assistant (and therefore Google) become the agent of the customer as a principal? If it does, shall it consequently take up legal obligations of agents (e.g. reasonable care) and potential responsibilities for its nonfeasance thereof?
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
601–610 of 786 posts
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#602"Duplex responding to a sync" makes me oddlly emotional. The AI (or "she", as I'm inclined to say), answers the question "are you here" with:
> Yeah, I'm here
I don't know why, but a machine dynamically saying "I'm here" in a completely naturally sounding way and in a very dynamic context really hits me,
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#603Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#604Why don’t they think even further ahead and build a robot that cuts your hair?
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really just an audio version of a loading bar or spinner - users get really uncomfortable if the UI becomes unresponsive for even a few hundred milliseconds, but they'll wait for several seconds if it looks like something is happening. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise
The "please wait while we verify your passcode" on our corporate phone conference system drives me nuts. In the time that it took to speak that sentence, the passcode could have been verified millions of times.
That may be yet another use case of delays: makes bruteforcing (or even plain guessing a few common codes) a lot slower.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe we should fix the phone system. Something is terribly broken when my connection to YouTube is better protected and authenticated than when I'm talking to the IRS over the telephone.
Why stop there? Why not fix human communication? Or how about we fix human behavior so there are no bad actors? Education may be hard, but scrapping and rebuilding a century-old communication standard in use by billions is harder. I used the IRS example because the IRS never calls you. This is only known through experience, i.e. education.
On irs.gov, it says:
> However, there are special circumstances in which the IRS will call or come to a home or business, such as when a taxpayer has an overdue tax bill, to secure a delinquent tax return or a delinquent employment tax payment, or to tour a business as part of an audit or during criminal investigations.
So the IRS might call if you owe taxes.
Surely moving from unsecured to a secured phone system can't be that big of a deal. In the US at least, we have experience something similar when we went from analog to digital television.
Add a secured mode of telephone calls and then telephone owners choose if they want to receive calls or messages from unauthenticated callers.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#607Earlier 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…
"This is a problem today because there is no universal Api that all services can use"
"It's the lack of a universal API."
I disagree with that. We already have universal APIS. Adopting a newly established Universal Api is far more painful and has slower adoption rate than using the existing-globally-reached one like a telephone. Google duplex like systems addresses a broader scope of computer verbal communication and it feels like a step in the right direction.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#608There's a great Black Mirror episode in here somewhere. Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply ( https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-repl... ) have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input. You could develop elaborate friendships where both parties are just having their AIs converse and aren't…
Sounds a bit like "Death Switch", a short story from "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" where our personal algorithms outlive us.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Duplex seems trained against this corpus. 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." So, you would just have an automated booking system API which is better handled by not placing calls as its form of communication. Right?
Opentable
And NASDAQ:BKNG in general (includes OpenTable).
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#610Funny how most people here are missing the point of this tech and talking about how this could be achieved by using an API or talking binary over the phone with another bot.
The idea here is to leverage an existent merchant base by adapting to how they work today. Suddenly they just integrated to millions of restaurants by adapting to them and not the other way around.
I'm sure Google Assistant will first check if there is a way to use tech like OpenTable to make the reservation and fall back to a phone call if there is no better alternative.