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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

#621

Post by spuz »

annexrichmond wrote: post #441

I already had a comment above about this but another thing I thought of that I don't see anyone discussing: What is the purpose of trying to fool the business owner into thinking it's a real person? It seems unethical, dishonest and disrespectful to the receiver having them believe they are talking to a real person. In the case of an AI failure at least the receiver will understand what's going on instead of becoming…

I would guess the purpose of fooling people is that you get a better result. If the call stated with "Hi, I'm a google assistant calling to request a reservation", you might get more hang ups. Of course, the reality could be the opposite as a business owner might make sure to speak more simply and clearly once they know they are speaking to a bot.

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

#622

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

It's basically what 'pjc50 said - it's not in the interest of businesses to expose their data via a common API.

WRT. using English as universal API, I think this is just dumb. You solve exactly zero problems by going that route, because the actual problems to solve (beyond no incentive for businesses to care) are exactly the same as you have with XML APIs, or any other APIs. The problems of discoverability and machine understanding is something the Semantic Web space has been dealing with for quite a while, and other people before that. Adding natural language to the mix only makes the job significantly more difficult, because you now have to deal with natural language parsing/understanding.

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

#623

Post by TeMPOraL »

smadge wrote: post #507
ZainRiz wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a sense you are correct, but remember that Duplex only works because it is limited to a very strict well specified domain: scheduling for restaraunts and hair salons. That is, Duplex only works because there already is a de facto specification for these transactions. It requires a lot less effort overall to just formally specify this de facto standard and deploy it once and for all, but of course a top down approa…

> Many organizations are providing the same services and could easily adopt a common “API.”

It's not in the interest of those organizations to adopt a common API. Everyone wants to suck in data and be the platform; nobody wants to give data away.

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

#624

Post by TeMPOraL »

FatalBaboon wrote: post #558
indemnity wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is installed when using a SaaS solution?

Well there is initial setup at the very least. Hooking up whatever landline the client has with the SaaS solution. Then whenever a significant change is required, you need to call back your "expert". New location? xk$, etc. But I think the biggest concern is that suddently the owner does not understand how his reversation system works. He used to be able to call Joe and know what's going on...

Also, whatever the SaaS system is, I bet you it's significantly less efficient than a receptionist using paper and desktop software.

Web systems are almost never built for productivity.

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

#625

Post by real-hacker »

freyir wrote: post #310
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…

> 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.

That form of communication exists. It's called REST.

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

#626

Post by danpalmer »

derefr wrote: post #225
danpalmer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re totally right. However while this is useful to bootstrap a new technology rollout, 10 years on its just technical debt. The amount of tech debt in the system behind credit cards is crazy, because originally charges where phoned in to the card issuer manually, and everything from then on - magstripe, chip & PIN, online only transactions, etc, has all been built on top, and the leaky abstractions show through in…

On the other hand, the credit card system's backcompat does mean that you can still accept credit cards when the power's out. You just write down the number (or use an imprint machine) and let the customer go. And the semantics of credit mean that you can still make that charge even if an online transaction would have resulted in a decline—offline transactions are never declined, they just cause overdrafts.

True! Although I think that's more of a byproduct, rather than something designed into the system at the moment, and I suspect we could do better with designing it. For example, I doubt many shops have those imprint machines any more.

I also think the tech debt is holding us back a long way. For example, why can't I see itemised receipts in my card statement? Paper receipts are on their way out, email receipts aren't linked to anything or structured data, but being able to see that I've spent $120 on shipping with Amazon in the last 12 months, so a Prime subscription would make sense, would be a great sort of financial tool to have. That isn't possible in the card network at the moment.

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

#627

Post by nothis »

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…

Now that you mention it, this super advanced AI project sounds like a failure of software standardization rather than a triumph of technology, lol.

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

#628

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

> Conversational English is a format.

And as you said, format isn't enough. You need semantics.

If two applications know enough about the other side to know how to formulate their voice queries, they know at least enough to exchange those same queries as text, and skip the stupidly wasteful text->speech->text process.

(And if world wouldn't be so full of adversarial practices driving engineering stupidity, the developers would agree on an efficient binary format beforehand.)

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

#629

Post by piyush_soni »

spuz wrote: post #618
piyush_soni wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't seem to find that post right now, but a person (on Quora/reddit I guess) who worked in the development team of a flight search company told this fact.

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

#630

Post by TeMPOraL »

positr0n wrote: post #325
tabs_masterrace wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn that sounds even more dystopian, can you imaging it "Hello how can I help you? - Hi, beep, I like to reserve a table? - Ok, beep, beep, on second - Mhm-mm beep, beep, sceech, 011000101010...."

Great comic on this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3576

Also a great story along very similar lines:

http://archive.today/txrAd

(Archive link because that blog now requires authorization to view for some reason.)

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