Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
631–640 of 786 posts
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#632Google 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…
This kind and volume of automation pervades written digital communication now, and has already been creeping into voice communication (scam calls and robodials).
Google bans botting against its own services, but can realistically only ban the botting it can detect. If you can detect NN voice botting, you can ban it for your own communications as well.
And if the technology to detect or tooling to effectively filter that doesn’t exist? Sounds like a great business opportunity.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#633Earlier 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…
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?
JSON? And no doubt in another ten years, something else!
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#634The 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 crazy as it seems at first glance, a double Duplex system would be a really beneficial result. What stops businesses from setting up Apis from scheduling services 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…
No, it doesn't.
The problem of universal API is entirely orthogonal to voice communications. Duplex is not a Turnig-complete system, it's just an API behind a voice recognition layer. All the important problems for universal APIs happen after that layer.
Ultimately, what you describe can work perfectly only when everyone is using Duplex, which is equivalent to everyone using Google-defined API. That's not universal, because you have one entity behind it.
The only way this brings us somewhat closer to universal API is that if you expect it to handle humans as well, it introduces some constraints to the space of possible APIs, which could make it easier for everyone to agree on a common format. Constraints of natural language processing without a human-level AI require your API to be very fuzzy and very lenient. There's nothing stopping one from implementing those same constraints over a text or binary protocol. Nothing except no reason for businesses to do it.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unfortunate that in 2018 we still have to resort to klugey work arounds like this with so many restaurants and hair salons instead of being able to make reservations online. There are services like OpenTable but even here in Silicon Valley only a small minority of restaurants use them. It seems like there's a huge opportunity if someone can crack the market.
I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to picking up the phone and talking to someone.
Good luck doing that at 3AM in the morning, because that's when you have the time to plan your weekend activities.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#636The 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.
The issue here is interfacing with ancient telephone systems.
If the two bots were to slip in some subliminal beeps and boops to recognize each other; then they could change their speech to very quick binary communication.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how no matter how amazing something is, someone will eventually say it's trivial, even though it's taken the smartest people on earth decades to figure out how to do this. >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. The end game is clearly to use an api, not this.
If you ever needed proof of the negativity in the tech community, this thread is it. Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".
Because idea of running machine2machine communication through Duplex, going binary -> text -> voice -> text -> binary, is just fucking dumb.
It's not proof of negativity in the tech community. If anything, it's a proof that tech community often can't pause and look if a particular idea makes engineering sense.
That's how we ended up with Electron.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#638Earlier 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…
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?
> Hasn’t happened yet... will it? Can it?
Nope. XML (or Json, etc.) are just "human-readable" presentation of data. It does not provides any semantic whatsoever.
So you need some semantic on top of these data. And a general-purpose, universal API is yet to be invented (hint: it is probably not feasible)
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#639Funny 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 th…
It seemed to me Google Duplex only works on the receiving side on the phone call. Not sure how much more complex initiating a call is.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The end game is clearly to use an api, not this. My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all. Voice bots like this will have the advantage of ubiquity. At least a couple years ago before every resteraunt had 5 tablets for all their seamless/grubhub/chowhound/whatever apps, pretty much the only rea…
Also, in the WeChat model, everyone is tied to WeChat and can't go around it. This voice based model can be integrated into any existing system. It already has the network effect going for it and it's not tied to the fate of any one company
No, you just become tied to Google. You can't reimplement Duplex yourself without reimplementing both their API and their voice recognition verbatim, and the best way to do that is to simply use their product.