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Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

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721–730 of 786 posts

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#721
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep, english is the protocol (like http) and the domain in question (for example booking an appointment) defines the (very loose) api

My god no one in this thread has a clue about the complexities of natural language. English is not a protocol like HTTP, it's a natural language.

I think you may be confused. I suspect everyone in the thread knows that English is a natural language.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#722
post #411

This is really horrifying to me. My heart goes out to the working-class retail people who are going to have to spend their days chatting with the AI assistants of upper middle class people too busy to call themselves. If the shop owner gets a duplex system to field the calls, then the two robots can subtly signal to the other they aren't actually human, and then start shrieking like a 9600 baud modem to finish the di…

> Upper middle class

Anyone who can afford the cheapest Android phone is not exactly upper middle class

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what is a 4 star restaurant given that the Micheline guide gives maximum 3 stars, but pretty much all starred restaurants want a deposit when reserving. If seriously there was someone dumb enough to do something like this, booking and cancelling continuously restaurants, then probably everyone would require a deposit when reserving and the deposit would be much bigger than today.

I've never heard of deposits for reservations for a restaurant. And I've at least once made a reservation for restaurant with a Micheline star. I'm not sure if this is common practice at least in Europe. I'm sure it's unheard-of in Turkey (and I've been lucky enough to make reservations for some high end and/or very popular restaurants). May I ask in which countries you've experienced this in? I'm genuinely curious.

I live in Portland, OR and I have to pay up front for a number of places I go to. Usually not the full meal (I think one or two places do that) but there's a deposit essentially that is taken off your bill (or given back if you cancel 24-48 hours ahead of time) at a good chunk of the nice places around.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays. Strongly disagree. A spinner on the web UI element that lasts longer than ~1 second indicates for me that the site's JavaScript broke again , and it's time to reload or wait for the devs to notice and fix it.

He's not talking about the cursor.

He's talking about a circular loading animation. Like the one that replaces the submit button when you're making a post on Twitter/Facebook.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#728

Can someone from the research community comment on how this compares to the state of the art in open research?

Neural networks are a fundamentally statistical technique, so you find the state of the art whereever you find the largest scale. No one is operating at larger scale than Google, which has the second order effect of attracting the best talent, which then gets sorted to the highest priority problems. There are a non-trivial number of instances where Google will beat their own state of the art, and I'm quite confident they are sitting on further results to avoid a public embaressment of riches.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#729
post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSON? And no doubt in another ten years, something else!

Luckily, the English language never changes. Wait.

But compared to the rate of change in technology, it's practically written in stone!

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays. Strongly disagree. A spinner on the web UI element that lasts longer than ~1 second indicates for me that the site's JavaScript broke again , and it's time to reload or wait for the devs to notice and fix it.

He's not talking about the cursor. He's talking about a circular loading animation. Like the one that replaces the submit button when you're making a post on Twitter/Facebook.

I'm talking exactly about that spinner. It's a lie. You quickly learn it has no relation whatsoever to what's happening in the background. And indeed it doesn't, because it's an animated GIF, completely detached from any logic or networking code!

(Compare the CLI spinner/fan - that "/ - \ |" animation used to indicate progress. There you know that each tick of the spinner means work has been done, because it has to be animated from code, and it's much simpler to just update it from the code that does the work.)

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