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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

#611

Post by dmihal »

dannyw wrote: post #459
ChristianGeek wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simplest "API" would be skipping the text-to-speech-to-text process, and send the text string in binary.

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

#612

Post by scrollaway »

cezart wrote: post #591
dannyw wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well they could at least continue doing the same thing, at 100x the speed.

Over the phone? Voice recognition would fail even more. Google also mentioned some of the latency in answering is required by their processing.

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

#613

Post by jen729w »

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…

May 2001: “XML: the universal language?” https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/XML-the-universal-lan...

I recall a Wired article from the same era. “XML means your doctor’s system can just talk to the hospital system even though they’re different!”

Hasn’t happened yet... will it? Can it?

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

#614

Post by bo1024 »

icebraining wrote: post #538
bo1024 wrote: post #280

I think it's unethical for a robocaller to incorporate things like "ums" and "ahs" intentionally to deceive people into thinking they're talking to a human. At least, it's disrespectful.

I disagree; ums and ahs are just part of the protocol of voice communication, hence robots should use them. I think it should just introduce itself as a robot.

I think we are in agreement -- I didn't say I thought ums and ahs are unethical on their own, just as part of deceiving someone into thinking they are talking to a human.

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

#615

Post by bo1024 »

icebraining wrote: post #540
amasad wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that. I think it's time for us, the tech industry, to start thinking about the ethical implications of the things we build before we release them. To make this salient for people: imagine this technology being deployed for political robocalls. An attractive voice masquerading as a person persuading people to vote for someone.

To make this salient for people: imagine this technology being deployed for political robocalls. An attractive voice masquerading as a person persuading people to vote for someone. They already hire telemarketing centers to do political calls; is this really so different?

I think robots masquerading as humans is unethical (or at least rude/disrespectful) in that context as well.

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

#616

Post by piyush_soni »

luckydata wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #2

> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversation…

It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.

Most of the flight search companies do the same ("Finding the best/cheapest flights for you"). It's almost instantaneous, but they introduce this artificial wait.

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

#617

Post by croon »

macintux wrote: post #269
jstanley wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood. So the difference is you interpret "noon" as an ill-defined probability distribution centred roughly around midday, rather than a concrete point in time, whereas you interpret "12PM" as a concrete point in time. Fair enough.

Go back further and "noon" is "whenever the sun is at its zenith" so we've definitely made strides.

Isn't that still the case, assuming central position within timezone and no summer time?

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

#618

Post by spuz »

piyush_soni wrote: post #616
luckydata wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.

Most of the flight search companies do the same ("Finding the best/cheapest flights for you"). It's almost instantaneous, but they introduce this artificial wait.

That seems unlikey. Flight search really does take a long time because they need to make API calls to external services for most customer requests and they need to refresh prices roughly hourly and so cannot rely on cached data. Also, even the best flight search websites are frustratingly slow. If that delay was created intentionally then they already lost me as a customer as a result.

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

#619

Post by spuz »

d--b wrote: post #349

THIS FUCKING SUCKS. I don't care the awesome technical achievement. The fact that I believe that I am talking to a real person but I am not is the worst. Can I call the restaurant and say:"well actually my wife doesn't like being cold so I'm not sure the terrace is going to work tonight" and have the computer answer something completely random is just so bad. The problem is not that the computer doesn't sound natural…

It sounds like you simply want Duplex to be better than it already is, not that you object to the technology in principle. Let's say it can handle requests like position in a restaurant or food specials or , would you approve of it?

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

#620

Post by b34r »

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…

It’s the lack of indication that you’re talking to an automated assistant and that fact that it uses human affectations in its speech that creeps me out hardcore.
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