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

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

#731

Post by amrx101 »

cromwellian wrote: post #128

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 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.

A colleague of mine is just going on about this.

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

#732

Post by susanhi »

cromwellian wrote: post #128

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…

You’re only looking at what it is today. You just need to extrapolate enough into the future to see how deeply disturbing this really is.

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

#734

Post by InclinedPlane »

cromwellian wrote: post #128

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 Turing Test is irrelevant, the "dystopian" stuff is mostly irrelevant, the ethics are highly relevant. It is simply unethical for a computer to converse with a human while misleading them into believing they are talking to a human. There are a zillion reasons why this is so, if none of them seem obvious then I'd suggest investing some time to take an ethics course.

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

#735

Post by topmonk »

Klathmon wrote: post #658
throwawayjava wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.…

Google may not be making money from direct payments from businesses, but getting access to yet another aspect of the life of their users (in this case, appointments made with what business and when), would be invaluable to them.

Just one more way that big business is taking over our lives. The world is becoming incredibly scary.

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

#736

Post by dx034 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #565
Lorkki wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a bit too juicy to be true. Any citations?

I've literally been in the room when legal and compliance offices gave the advice on both the construction of the relevant regulations and industry practices on which a payer relied on in deciding to use a process that created paper documents then faxed them for certain purposes, but, no, there's nothing published I can link to as to that being the reason industry players make that decision. I can, however, point you…

> if the information being exchanged did not exist in electronic form immediately before the transmission

So you need to print them out before faxing? PDF->Fax wouldn't work with that definition.

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

#737

Post by taneq »

jen729w wrote: post #613
ZainRiz wrote: post #381

Earlier 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…

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?

I read a great article about XML that spelled out that XML isn't a "language" or protocol, it's an "alphabet". It gives you the building blocks but what you build with it but it doesn't translate from one language to another. (I guess that's what XSLT is meant to do but it's still not magic.)

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

#739

Post by skookumchuck »

During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans infiltrated the American lines with fake Army officers who would give unproductive and confusing orders. The impostors spoke perfect English and often had been raised in the US.

The GIs unmasked them by asking them questions about baseball and shooting any with a wrong answer.

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