No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself • Hacker News Board

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#81

Post by kolpa » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #59

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message. >We could argue whether or no…

The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care. It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one. That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laund…

I'm curious where you live. In my area, a "nanny" is exclusively or childcare (and well paid, including Social Security and Unemployment premiums), with no meal prep or laundry. We "cleaned the house for the nanny" to avoid embarrassment. Honestly it felt more like we were charitable sponsors to an underemployed youth (in exchange for having someone fulfill the obligation of keeping the toddler accompanied) than we were hiring an employee.

It's a far cry from the do-everything (and possibly cash-under-the-table) servant help I've seen in the past/elsewhere.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#82

Post by walshemj » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

SCHiM wrote: post #36

stcredzero wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part. My wife works in banking, and she's discovered that she has a superpower: She can read large amounts of dense text quickly and comprehend it. Yes, her superpower is reading! Incredible as it sounds, there are lots of C-level people in her field wh…

I remember students in my class barely passing comprehensive reading tests. I find it hard to believe that they've improved without the pressure that school/university puts on them.

Which class was this?

I remember being shocked in my Classical Studies class that I was the only one who had read all of Thucydides (only books 6 an d7 where set) let alone doing a lot of reading of related text's

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#83

Post by kolpa » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #68

fjsolwmv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember this story? A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-tw...

That title is atrocious, though. The cellphone didn't kill anyone, this is basically an "honor killing".

Right, but the honor-killing was triggered by a miscommunication due to the phone's poor ability to transmit language.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#84

Post by kolpa » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #49

fjsolwmv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember this story? A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-tw...

No, but I remember this one, where a court determined "give me a lawyer dog" meant "give me a lawyer-dog" rather than "give me a lawyer, dog" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...

That article is almost certainly wrong, or at least misleading.

The question at hand was whether this statement was a direct request for a counsel, or just chatter.

"This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.”

The court decided " (agreeing with the lower courts’ conclusion that the 1 2 statement “[m]aybe I should talk to a lawyer” is not an unambiguous request for a lawyer). In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel". There's a little bit of cultural bias in the "dog" part, but the main thrust is that the defendant didn't make a clear statement of invocation.

IMO the law as it stands is horrid -- legal representation should be the default unless explicitly waived, not the reverse, but under the current law the decision turned on whether that statements was a demand for a lawyer or merely a suggestion.

http://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdfrt

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#85

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

aquamo wrote: post #48

After reading some of the responses to the google demo, my first reaction was to assume this natural language processing magic was just a placeholder until the business had a proper api in place. After all, that would be more efficient, right? Google doesn't take human phone calls so why should anyone else have to? And as good workers, efficiency and productivity should trump any expression of humanity we might have…

[deleted]

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#86

Post by sli » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

fenwick67 wrote: post #12

I'm more worried about autocomplete doing things like... Let's get together for [some tacos at Chipotle™️] or I could really use [an ice cold Coke™️ right now]

There was a short time when Swiftkey was suggesting a worrying number of copyrighted brand names to me. Enough that I noticed it was doing it far more then usual (which previously was somewhere between never and almost never). It stopped within a week, but that was a little uncomfortable.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#87

Post by salgernon » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #70

gyom wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the subjects believe that they were interacting with another person via a computer, when in fact they were interacting with a program (makes everything more standard and easier to analyse). One day he participated in this "split or share" kind of experiment, and he was ruthless…

It's going to be quite the adventure for anyone who happens to sound like the automated voices.

Susan Bennett, the voice of Siri:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Bennett

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#88

Post by rafiki6 » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

Not sure why the reaction to this is so negative. Google's own AI blog (https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...) admits that this is a very specific use case system. And it seems to be more of an engineering feat than an actual "AI" or even "ML" accomplishment. Basically this is the result of a very well trained system by a bunch of HUMANS. The bots aren't here for us yet folks, take a chill pill. If Google wants to create a bunch of task specific conversational bots to bake into their already excellent voice assistant, why not?

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#89

Post by kolpa » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58

sumeno wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you get to choose how I communicate?

If you're talking to me , I get to choose whether you communicate with me. If I don't like how you communicate, I'm more likely to decide that you don't get to communicate at all.

OK, but that's an awful way to run a business, turning a way polite customers just because they don't vocalize for you.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#90

Post by ktsmith » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #59

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message. >We could argue whether or no…

The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care. It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one. That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laund…

> All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet.

Even scheduling appointments as in their demo can be really beneficial. My wife and I both work, I have flexibility to make calls during the day but she really doesn't. As a teacher she's constantly having her lunch or short breaks while the kids are at recess taken up by work issues. A surprising number of places are also closed shortly after she gets off work as well. Yesterday she tried to make an appointment with her doctors office and spent her full ten minute recess time on hold. She did end up getting through after school right before they closed but spent an additional ten minutes on hold. None of our doctors, dentists, barbers/stylists have online booking systems. The doctors offices have automated appointment reminder systems but that's it.

> Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me.

This doesn't work for someone in her situation. There are a ton of hourly workers that are in the same boat. I showed my wife the demo of duplex last night and her responses were that it was amazing and unfortunate that it wasn't available yet.