At the same time, 9out of 10 times when my wife calls me the system pretends it's ringing, while I see no sign of a phone call. Both of us are on Project Fi. (We tried it standing next to each other both of us with full LTE). I guess guess google figured the people will blame each other, not the network. Anyway, I can't keep disabling all the smart features of smart phones, I might just get a new Nokia 3310.
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
651–660 of 786 posts
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#652Earlier 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…
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.
Sounds a lot like a dialup handshake.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's the lack of a universal API. This sort of thing is exactly why the healthcare industry still uses faxes, even going electronic charts -> pdf -> fax -> pdf -> electronic charts in some cases.
This is even more fun because in the modern age, what very often ends up happening is: electronic charts -> pdf -> fax -> fax machine as a service -> unsecured email -> pdf -> electronic charts Compliance can sometimes help, but ultimately the data needs to flow, and people will do whatever it takes to make that happen. Until security is so easy that it's the default, these little loopholes will continue to be abused…
Phaxio co-founder here. We do a _ton_ of heathcare faxing and we're starting to see a shift away from the "unsecure email" in applications. Granted, we can't see what our users are doing at all times but being HIPAA compliant ourselves, we often work with our users to understand their systems and guide them towards compliance.
>> Until security is so easy that it's the default, these little loopholes will continue to be abused.
The simple way to think about this is that the government is more worried about unsecure email/email spoofing than it is about wiretapping.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think about it, conversation is just a loosely defined API with an extremely high degree of tolerance for poorly formed input.
I mean we are all just emotional processing silos that trade information and process it right :) ?
That’s a very Wittgensteinian view.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#655Earlier 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…
The one or both speakers could use a handshake noise at the start of the call to tell the receiver that it's capable of "speaking" a modem protocol. It might change a little every time, or be of an especially low or high frequency so that a person doesn't realize they're talking with a computer. After handshaking, the receiver could send a URL that would allow the channel to be upgraded to the Internet... or not. English is a good fallback if both people speak it and you can't find a more efficient channel.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#656The 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.
you mean the entire tcp stack and network to network communication?
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#657Just a side question but related: Is there any good-and-new ML research/model/example for "Language detection"?
For example I have a conversation in both English/Russian and I want to segment the input according to each language then handle each language separately.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. They pointed out during the presentation that the system could call once to a business and get the hours, then allow hundreds or thousands of users to see that without bothering the business again. Assuming it works, it could save a significant amount of time for some places. >If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant. Th…
>>If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant. >Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them. But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business. Seems far more likely that they'd pay Google to automat…
>But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business.
If it's costing more money than it's bringing in, then it's no longer worth it. If it's bringing in more money than it costs, then it's a good thing for the business.
If a business needs to hire a dedicated phone person because they are getting so many appointments filled, they aren't going to be upset. But if they get so many flakers that won't show up, they are losing money as customers that will show up are getting pushed out, so they will block Duplex. There are also other ways to solve this problem, require a phone number and name and block or charge people for missed appointments if they try to reschedule. Require some kind of down-payment over the phone when making the appointment. There are tons of solutions to this problem.
At no point is "Pay google to handle the calls" an option. This is really only for places that don't have an online appointment system (that possibly integrates into google), so the solution to the duplex calls would be to invest in one. Since "pay google to handle duplex" would look a lot like an API to a scheduling system anyway, and an independent one (with integrations into Google's systems) would reach more customers.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#659The 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…
Dude, this system has better conversation skills than me. I mean literally. Well, I'am autistic + esl (+ kinda too why). But still it's kinda incredible that a system is actually better.
"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
English, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild
If it was that straightforward, we’d already have bots that pass the Turing Test. Whatever natural language is, it’s not an API. Might have some overlap, but it’s different.
Nobody said it's easy to implement :)
I'm curious - what differences do you have in mind?