661–670 of 786 posts
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And $20,000 to get someone who knows how to install such a system to do the job.
What is installed when using a SaaS solution?
The issue isn't universal API, but universal data models which is probably impossible.
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People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.
OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing. Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. The…
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It reminds me of the maybe apocryphal story how NASA invested time, money, and effort to develop a pen so astronauts could write in zero gravity, and the Soviets used pencils.
A great story, but you are correct about it being apocryphal: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/
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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?
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.
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Maybe it'll motivate more businesses to put more of their transactional things online where the bot can do it without bothering a real human, and real humans who don't want to use this can also avoid spending more time on the phone than they have to. Honestly, the degree to which telephone calls are still necessary in day to day life is absurd. If this hastens their demise then I'm all for it.
Phone calls are necessary for anything that needs flexibility. Coding flexibility in a website is incredibly hard. Think about it. A restaurant doesn't have anything veggie on the menu, a last minute guest arrives and is veggie. You call to ask if there is something that can be done. It's possible to code that, but it's a lot of work to get all the scenarios right.
In the case of a restaurant, having their menu online would make it so you knew in advance of the restaurant has something you can eat. Lots of restaurants still don't do even this.
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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!
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"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?
The point being is that it's a human speech API which is easier for humans to utilize "manually" if they don't have a robot servant.
This is amazing, but one thing I don't really understand is this: earlier in the presentation, they demoed some new Google Assistant voices. All of them sound like standard computer-synthesized assistants. On the other hand, the synthesized Duplex voices sound indistinguishable from human speech to me, even without the "disfluencies" they include. If Google has gotten speech synthesis to this point, why isn't Assista…