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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

#761

Post by obsurveyor »

annabellish wrote: post #584
mauriciob wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are prejudiced against talking to bots because of how bad they are currently. I despise calling services that have voice recognition, often times it's easier to have an options menu. If they can get a way of saying "I'm a bot" without people hanging up the calls, I'm all for it -- otherwise, "I'm calling for a client" or similar is the best for everyone involved (assuming everything works). Businesses also nee…

How about something like "I'm an automated agent calling for a client" - correct, not misleading, but using terminology which isn't likely to be immediately disconnected _right now_. Of course, if they screw it up, they'll burn that terminology too.

Yeah, something like "Hello, I'm Rogers' Assistant..." to fit current Google naming conventions would probably be fine.

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

#762

Post by pharke »

danShumway wrote: post #671
uryga wrote: post #660

Earlier 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…

You're right that the language is not the API, it is the medium. The "appointment booking API" exists only in our heads, it is a set of mutually understood conventions for interpreting a subset of language in order to create a record of the appointment somewhere.

If you call up a hair salon and start reciting poetry you'll get an error response in the same way as you would if you had sent malformed JSON to an endpoint. If you stick to the expected script you'll achieve success almost all of the time.

I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of human communication works this way, especially when it involves individuals who do not know each other. We have agreed upon limits, key phrases and words, and expected responses that allow most of the unpredictable stuff to be ruled out. All of that favours automation.

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

#763

Post by killjoywashere »

robterrell wrote: post #713
sitepodmatt wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and others enterprise selling vendors loved the end goal back in early 2000s - the universal API solved by middleware. That's why you had Biztalk and Biztalk consultants that made more than SAP consultants (think todays crazy Salesfarce consultants that compete for gamification badges). For example you could be a small insurance company submitting to a larger underwriter, and when you work out the transacti…

In the 80's, it was EDI -- electronic data interchange, a set of schemes for sending binary formatted business data, like invoices and POs.

Don't forget HL7

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

#764

Post by VikingCoder »

bambax wrote: post #557

Google 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…

Google has literally thousands of developer APIs.

That's as far from "Google bans bots on its own servers" as you can get.

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

#765

Post by danShumway »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #747
danShumway wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

:) I don't think that's pedantic, it's a really good point to bring up.

On the web side of things, the W3C often describes their role as being partially descriptive.

From their doc on the Web of Things[0]: "The Web of Things is descriptive, not prescriptive, and so is generally designed to support the security models and mechanisms of the systems it describes, not introduce new ones... while we provide examples and recommendations based on the best available practices in the industry, this document contains informative statements only."

This is exactly for the reason you mention - if browsers collectively decide to go in a different direction, what the W3C says doesn't matter. The web standard is what the browsers do.

However, two things to keep in mind:

Even where browsers are concerned, there is still an API and a canonical version of "correct" for each browser. What we're trying to do is get those APIs to be compatible and consistent with each other.

Many people believe that language even on an individual level doesn't directly map to an actual reality; in web standards that would be like the browsers themselves not having their own consistent API.

But assume those people are wrong for a sec. Let's assume that language is just a standardization problem between different communities and individuals. Well, the W3C should teach us that even in the realm of computing, standardization is really stinking hard.

So even in that scenario, we have to ask whether standardization becomes easier or harder when every single individual in a community has the ability to change norms or introduce more language. We can't even get 3-4 browser manufacturers to agree on a single API, now imagine if every single hair salon owner could increase divergence whenever they wanted just by answering phone calls differently.

[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-security/

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

#766

Post by danShumway »

pharke wrote: post #762
danShumway wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right that the language is not the API, it is the medium. The "appointment booking API" exists only in our heads, it is a set of mutually understood conventions for interpreting a subset of language in order to create a record of the appointment somewhere. If you call up a hair salon and start reciting poetry you'll get an error response in the same way as you would if you had sent malformed JSON to an endpoin…

> We have agreed upon limits, key phrases and words, and expected responses that allow most of the unpredictable stuff to be ruled out. All of that favours automation.

I'm not sure I'd disagree, but it seems you're just describing a domain specific language in a more roundabout way. We have a ton of protocols that introduce a set of limits, key phrases, words, and responses. Java, Network protocols, XML, JSON, etc...

Assuming that you're correct, does it make sense to then assume that it'll be an improvement to standardize English rather than a set of IP headers? The agreed upon standards in English are (for the most part) informal, evolve constantly, and are hard to teach to computers. Automation favors predictability, and even the most generous interpretation of a natural language leaves me feeling like it's a step backwards.

We're going to standardize on an appointment booking API that exists only in our heads, that can only be taught using ML, and that is guaranteed to change over time in unpredictable ways? That seems wrong to me.

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

#767

Post by hedgedoops2 »

ZainRiz wrote: post #381
freyir wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex. And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.

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…

If I remember correctly, CORBA was all about standardizing APIs. You'd have your distributed "CORBA Objects" whose methods anyone who knew the unique object ID could call. The idea was that there would be a "standard library" for each industry. So all the barbers would implement a standard library "Appointment Schedule" object, all the exchanges would implement a stdlib "Orderbook" object, etc.

CORBA would generate RPC stub objects for you in various OOP languages, and potentially automate discovery, so you could say, give me all an array of all the orderbooks of all the bitcoin exchanges, and ask each for the last price.

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

#768

Post by darkmighty »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #760
darkmighty wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 can understand actual language speech" - "we do that now" We have mood classification, but understanding ? [citation-needed]

By understanding he means translating speech to text, I guess. We have speech-to-text systems that are better than the median human in the native language now. Quite amazing, given how central auditory language processing is in our cognition. And most people don't think it's "AI" (and certainly not anywhere near AGI). That's a good example of how AI is a moving target IMO.

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

#769

Post by darkmighty »

akvadrako wrote: post #750
darkmighty wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

First of all you can't brute force the chess. Algorithms that beat high level chess players are non-trivial, even with todays computers. In fact top engines today all use carefully designed heuristics hand-crafted by experts -- this notion that Big Blue, Deep fritz, etc were dumb "brute force search engines" is a misleading tale.

Second, in the 70s there was no computer power even for quite clever algorithms (that probably didn't exist yet) to beat top chess players. Chess was seen as a grand goal requiring utmost intelligence -- while it is obvious in hindsight, at the time the intuition was probably that extremely "intelligent" humans were required to play chess, and in fact the best chess players were among the most "intelligent" persons -- it was a clear exclusively intellectual task that few people were competent at. So many believed that chess would be one of the greatest challenges to AI (the clarity of the rules added convenience of research and implementation). Things like walking didn't seem intellectually demanding, so the common sense was that it is probably "easy". In fact today we know that navigating a bipedal robot in a simple environment through visual recognition is vastly more difficult computationally than playing chess well, it is only easier for us because we have highly specialized circuitry in our brain hat is well matched to those tasks. Our brain wetware is not very well matched to playing chess.

Also chatbots have been doing pretty well on Turing's original definition of a Turing test, ever since about 10 years ago. But now it is being argued that Turing didn't really see the "loopholes" they believe the bots are exploiting, and are coming up with more strict requirements for a Turing test.

That's totally in line with Tao's argument that every time we approach a major AI goal, suddenly it is not AI anymore, because there's nothing magical about it, just boring old technology. And human brains are magical, right?

Until every obscure niche capability of humans has been dominated in every possible way by AIs many won't want to concede that it really is AI. And even when it does become better than us in every possible way, I suspect a few will still find arbitrary reasons why it really isn't AI/AGI, e.g. because it is not organic, because the computer lacks a body, because it lacks a "soul", etc.

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

#770

Post by akvadrako »

darkmighty wrote: post #769
akvadrako wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First of all you can't brute force the chess. Algorithms that beat high level chess players are non-trivial, even with todays computers. In fact top engines today all use carefully designed heuristics hand-crafted by experts -- this notion that Big Blue, Deep fritz, etc were dumb "brute force search engines" is a misleading tale. Second, in the 70s there was no computer power even for quite clever algorithms (that pr…

You might be right about chess, but I can't understand how you think chat bots are "doing pretty well". I've never seen a conversation with one that held up to even the most tolerant hand-holding for more than a few sentences.
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