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No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

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

#111

Post by dragonwriter »

vertexFarm wrote: post #110
cromwellian wrote: post #6

The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it seems a lot of instant messaging boils down to pictures, emoji, memes, and short responses ("I'll be there at XXX") The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Part of what we're seeing with the automation go…

I know lots of people will roll their eyes at the old man who complains and shakes his cane about the decline of long-form communication and the thoughtfulness of written correspondence. But I don't care if they think I'm paranoid and silly. I think it's a damn shame to replace common literacy and writing with tweets and autocomplete that eventually just takes over for you entirely. Here's the thing about these littl…

Writing itself is a convenience and time saver to avoid memorizing and repeated vocal recitation. I don't disagree that there is a continued march of convenience, I'm just not convinced that there is any justification to the idea that there is a “this far and no further” point at which thst March stops being a net gain, and even less coonvinced that that point is conveniently just before the convenience advanced of the last few years (or even generations).

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

#112

Post by mikeash »

p2t2p wrote: post #80
mikeash wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they’re being used to cover up computation delays on the back end, I feel like the hems and haws go beyond merely making the system more realistic and enters into outright fraud. By all means, sound natural and good, but don’t actually pretend to be a human if you’re not. (And suddenly I have a vision of that last sentence being used against me in court in a few decades, with a jury consisting entirely of AIs.…

However you’d expect an Mmmm-hm as reaction to certain phrases as an ACK. What it does is just ACKing the phrase from other user. I wonder if other user would get worried and started asking “are you there?” if they didn’t receive the ACK Edit: typos

Totally! My bad reaction is to things like interstitial “um” which is completely unnecessary in a computer voice.

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

#113

Post by wool_gather »

viridian wrote: post #7

I find myself surprisingly agreeing with this article. The "everyone's voice begins to sound the same" aspect of it is something I hadn't even considered, and does feel a little bit unnerving to me. Maybe unnerving isn't even the right word, but I can't think of a more appropriate one. Luckily though, soon I'll be able to ask google for the correct one.

I agree as well, but only in part -- there's a big difference between the email suggestions and the voice assistant.

The email is _as if_ coming directly from you. It's got your name signed on to it. The argument that your voice may be distorted rings true here.

When your phone is making calls on your behalf, it's not literally calling up and saying, "Hi, my name is ${USERNAME}, I'd like to book a spa" It represents itself as another person, doing something on your behalf. (The assistant in the example call asked to book an appointment "for my client".)

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

#114

Post by fzzzy »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #31
will_brown wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve previously posted (to surprisingly supportive reception) about my Dad’s collection of letters from 1956-1966 while traveling some 4 million miles around the world in the navy and State Department. Some might find it interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d... Separately, my grandfather (on my Mom’s side) was likely one of those “elites” having been a named partner of an AM100 law…

That's fantastic. “dictated not read.” means "I didn't have time to check that this is correct, please speed extra of your unimportant time to proofread for me." What a birthday gift! To be fair, though, if the message was nice, dictation is t really an alternative to a telephone message which is also dictated but not so derided.

It’s highly amusing to me that you didn’t proofread your comment.

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

#115

Post by wilsonnb »

subculture wrote: post #18
wilsonnb wrote: post #2

I see their point about "your" voice being sucked out of your emails if you use autocomplete for 90% of them. I don't really care about that though. Most people I know have moved on from using email for personal communication and only use it for business. In that situation, I don't really care if my email sounds like me or not. It's just performing a function. It's not a creative expression. It's not any different th…

Has Google said one way or another whether Smart Compose will take into account your personal writing style? For it to be acknowledged as a really great feature in practice I assume that it should.

That's a good point. You would think it would since Google already analyzes the stuff in your inbox.

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

#116

Post by romwell »

jdietrich wrote: post #92
Zanni wrote: post #5

I like to be clear on whether I'm interacting with a human or a bot because different social conventions apply. If you're human, I'll treat you like one, and that means giving you some consideration at the expense of expediency. If you're a bot, let's just cut to the fucking chase. So a bot that acts like a human (with hems and haws) is just wasting my time. Ditto a human being that has been reduced to a bot by follo…

> So a bot that acts like a human (with hems and haws) is just wasting my time. Duplex largely uses hems and haws like humans do - to signal that they're thinking about what to say next. The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which all…

Oh gee thanks. I have an accent, ring me up when they make a bot that understands me when I don't speak in an unnatural, over-enunciated style.

Voice recognition has been improving greatly, but it is still painfully close to the Scottish Elevator[1] at times in my experience.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kue42kO0hY

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

#117

Post by romwell »

cromwellian wrote: post #6

The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it seems a lot of instant messaging boils down to pictures, emoji, memes, and short responses ("I'll be there at XXX") The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Part of what we're seeing with the automation go…

I would disagree, if only I because I still write letters.

But then I am one of the people who writes SMS messages long enough that they are unreadable on the recepeint's end.

(And yes, turns out that you can type a long enough SMS message that it wouldn't display fully on a modern Android phone even after the auto-conversion to MMS. That saddens me. I guess you may be right, after all.)

On the other hand, people write more these days than they ever have. And even in this thread, the individual comments end up running quite long - long enough to be short letters if you were to write them by hand. Turns out, when you are actually trying to make a point, being brief is more difficult than being wordy.

So perhaps it's not the art of writing "long-form" (a modern term) that is dying - perhaps it's writing longform intended for one recipient only - and perhaps even that is temporary. Time will tell.

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

#118

Post by vertexFarm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #111
vertexFarm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of people will roll their eyes at the old man who complains and shakes his cane about the decline of long-form communication and the thoughtfulness of written correspondence. But I don't care if they think I'm paranoid and silly. I think it's a damn shame to replace common literacy and writing with tweets and autocomplete that eventually just takes over for you entirely. Here's the thing about these littl…

Writing itself is a convenience and time saver to avoid memorizing and repeated vocal recitation. I don't disagree that there is a continued march of convenience, I'm just not convinced that there is any justification to the idea that there is a “this far and no further” point at which thst March stops being a net gain, and even less coonvinced that that point is conveniently just before the convenience advanced of t…

Yeah, it's been a trend in the past. You think it's linear? You don't see that it's picking up extremely quickly during this generation specifically? Do you think that we should be completely unconcerned about the fact that future generations will have lives completely dissimilar to any previous? And we don't know anything about the consequences.

People have this idea that information technology is so innocent and only improves, never harms. I feel like this field is about to get a reckoning, but it's not going to be something we can undo. I don't think it's crazy to be skeptical and careful about it. I don't think it's a good idea to just assume it's fine and normal.

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

#119

Post by Sylos »

craftyguy wrote: post #104
randomsearch wrote: post #103

Things this technology will not be good at: - making reservations etc on your behalf Things this technology will be good at: - automatically calling lots of businesses and individuals to extract data from them: from opening hours to voting preferences, scam calls to political campaigning with personalised campaign messages, large-scale cold call automated advertising, crowd sourcing information, surveys, and the most…

This technology is literally a phone scammer's/spammer's wet dream.

That's probably my favorite part about being a tech person. When non-techies ask you what JavaScript in Excel is useful for, and you can respond in the dryest of ways "Primarily malware".

And then they look at you like "But you're the tech person, you never think that technology is stupid".

Which it isn't, just some companies behind it really fucking are.

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

#120

Post by Sylos »

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…

> Google doesn't take human phone calls so why should anyone else have to?

Google lost a lawsuit two weeks ago in Germany, which was about whether or not a human being would have to be reachable through a contact e-mail address that they're legally required to put onto their webpage.

Previously, they just responded with canned text containing some links to FAQ and whatnot.

All they would have to do, is tell one of their employees to read and respond to those mails for like half an hour a day, so that it's technically possible to reach a human being through there. Instead they fought out a lawsuit, lost, appealed, lost a second time and are now considering appealing yet another time.

German source: https://www.golem.de/news/kommunikationspflicht-gericht-krit...

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