This is really impressive and all, but what's wrong with saying upfront this is a robot, let it speak it's robotic accent, and let the human know it's speaking to a robot.
Assuming this tech is just to bridge current times when most businesses aren't fully automated, and the end goal is to replace BOTH ends of the conversation with robots, in that case the conversation protocol doesn't have to be English, or even voice.
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
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scots are definitely native english speakers, reluctant ones at that, but english nonetheless
I think the person you are responding to might have been talking about those who speak the language Scots, not just Scottish people. Many consider Scots to be an actual language separate from English. There's a good amount of debate about this among linguists, I think. For anyone curious, I recommend reading these pages from the recent Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book to get a feel for how it differs…
oh wow I thought scots was a joke language mocking the scottish accent
oops!
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#743I am the only one that sees totally that this product is result of work done for military? Task: Sergeant Google, use everything you have to analyze all audio streams in real time. There are multiple enemies to look for, be alert! Google: Ay, ay chief. Can i use this for my troops to order pizza? Chief: Affirmative. Do it, this is Murica, pizza is important.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#744Google itself (Google Search) is extremely wary of being used by "bots" and uses string of captchas to screen them out. But search is just a machine. That Google would create bots to talk to real people is horrifying. This is only possible if Google doesn't in fact think of working people answering the phone, as really human. This is like doing war with drones instead of soldiers. This may sound over the top, but bea…
> Making a telephone call rests on the same convention: you are allowed to make someone spend time on the phone with you, because you're spending your own time.
I personally, absolutely do not think of it that way. Whenever I get called by a call center, I always immediately say "not interested" and drop the call. It's rude, but I think these companies are not entitled to my time.
Because of that I think the problem is already there. This is certainly another step in the wrong direction, but thousands of workers in thousands of callcenters are basically already a human botnet.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hasn’t happened yet... will it? Can it? Nope. XML (or Json, etc.) are just "human-readable" presentation of data. It does not provides any semantic whatsoever. So you need some semantic on top of these data. And a general-purpose, universal API is yet to be invented (hint: it is probably not feasible)
Of course it's feasible. It's called English!
Quoi? ("...fetchez la vache!!!")
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
English, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild
If you think about it, conversation is just a loosely defined API with an extremely high degree of tolerance for poorly formed input.
This thread now contains a loop. Granted, it's a really long loop, all the way back to 1956, but it's a loop all right: you've essentially summarized the Dartmouth Conference and its assumption "gee, that ought be just a minor research subject - easy, right?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody said it's easy to implement :) I'm curious - what differences do you have in mind?
APIs map to a single canonical concept. A "class" in Java actually has a correct definition. There are a nontrivial number of philosophers who believe that this isn't true for language. To simplify that and put it in more technical terms, an API is perscriptive and a language is descriptive . If a bunch of coders decide to start capitalizing "Class" their code won't compile. If enough people start using the word "ain…
Pedantry ahead: the various implementations of (J(ava)?|ECMA)Script tend to disagree with the point on pREscription and non-divergence (yay 20 MB of stubs and libraries for sort-of-coherent behavior). Moreover, the example of "Class" is just a pre-compile check convention, the compiler doesn't care.
(Postel w/r/t API - Does that make any sense? Or is that a fancy way to say DWIM?)
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a sense you are correct, but remember that Duplex only works because it is limited to a very strict well specified domain: scheduling for restaraunts and hair salons. That is, Duplex only works because there already is a de facto specification for these transactions. It requires a lot less effort overall to just formally specify this de facto standard and deploy it once and for all, but of course a top down approa…
> Many organizations are providing the same services and could easily adopt a common “API.” It's not in the interest of those organizations to adopt a common API. Everyone wants to suck in data and be the platform; nobody wants to give data away.
...but Google is one of the giants that could pull that off and become The Platform.
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#749Earlier 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…
The one or both speakers could use a handshake noise at the start of the call to tell the receiver that it's capable of "speaking" a modem protocol. It might change a little every time, or be of an especially low or high frequency so that a person doesn't realize they're talking with a computer. After handshaking, the receiver could send a URL that would allow the channel to be upgraded to the Internet... or not. Eng…
Revenge of Cap'n'Crunch :D
Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, this system has better conversation skills than me. I mean literally. Well, I'am autistic + esl (+ kinda too why). But still it's kinda incredible that a system is actually better.
"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t…
Who in the 70's thought AI would be defined by being good at chess? I mean it can just about brute force the game; how is that intelligent?
The Turing test is way older and seems to have been the standard measure since it's inception.