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Computer, Respond to This Email

googleresearch.blogspot.com

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Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#121

Post by Stasis5001 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #73
supersan wrote: post #52

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associat…

> "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". Sure, if you use the word thinks . If you instead say "if msg.Contains "attach" then warn" it's not that impressive. The feature in the article is a bit more than a single if.

I just tried sending "Attached is my photo". Then "I've been feeling less attached to you". One warns, the other doesn't. This is also more than a single if.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#122

Post by sanderjd »

mmanfrin wrote: post #93
supersan wrote: post #52

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associat…

I had a similar thought with Apple -- El Cap has a feature where if you shake your mouse around, the cursor will momentarily grow in size so you can find where it is. That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.

I love that feature.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#124

Post by blixt »

This kind of stuff is really cool. I imagine the future of Google being the same old search box, but instead of entering a search query, you engage in a conversation with Google so you can delve deeply into a narrow topic and get back tailored responses to your question (as opposed to opening 10 tabs of Stack Overflow links that are maybe related to your question).

I worry a bit about the long-term risks of this kind of training (query / reply). While this is obviously very far from being "high resolution" enough to single out very specific information, at some point these kinds of tools (and assistant AIs that can answer questions) will out of necessity be able to converse around very domain specific topics. At this point, how do they know what data is private and what is not? It could be tempting to train these AIs on chat logs or e-mail conversations, but that'd give them knowledge of very private information which they might leak to others. Even if they're limited to data that is accessible anonymously, they'd be extremely good at picking up information that wasn't intended for the public. For example, if you could describe a person called /u/andreasblixt on reddit, and leave it up to the bot to put the pieces together that this person is also on Facebook, Twitter, etc... and that obscure forum from 10 years ago. Food for thought.

A final thought on this... When these assistant AIs will inevitably have to know something about you. For example, your preferred schedule, food restrictions, preferred airlines, name, family, friends, phone numbers, where you were last night, who you've talked to, etc. Even if we all get our own namespaced AI assistant (i.e., the trained neural network that contains private information is stored and encrypted for your access only), that assistant's "brain" may very well become a prized target because if you get access to it you can interrogate it for information (you most likely can't just access the information in any meaningful way – you'd literally have to give it queries to make it return semantic output with the information you're trying to access).

Anyway, automatic e-mail responses, yay!

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#125

Post by denniskane »

I have a concern that is somewhat related to this issue. I've been wanting to play around with doing NLP in the client using the SpeechRecognition API available in Chrome. It typically gives pretty good results for simple recognition purposes, but there is not yet any way to specify an arbitrary grammar for the backend service to use. This is a big deal when someone wants to be able to recognize a name spelled like "Bobbie" rather than "Bobby". The W3C Web Speech spec currently allows for setting arbitrary grammars, but it isn't implemented. I'm just saying it would be cool if some of you AI geniuses at Google could help me out on that front.

You can play around with the dumb little AI app that I've been working on that does a little bit of NLP in the browser. Check out this site with Chrome: https://yc-prototype.appspot.com. His name is Bertie. You should see his face on the bottom of the page. The site works like an OS in your browser.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#126

Post by Maxious »

mmanfrin wrote: post #93
supersan wrote: post #52

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associat…

I had a similar thought with Apple -- El Cap has a feature where if you shake your mouse around, the cursor will momentarily grow in size so you can find where it is. That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.

I seem to recall the Microsoft Mouse drivers for Windows 95 had a key shortcut to make lines radiate out of your cursor. Very useful on the low refresh rate LCDs where that cursor would appear like a submarine on the other side of the screen.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#127

Post by rylee »

Maxious wrote: post #126
mmanfrin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar thought with Apple -- El Cap has a feature where if you shake your mouse around, the cursor will momentarily grow in size so you can find where it is. That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.

I seem to recall the Microsoft Mouse drivers for Windows 95 had a key shortcut to make lines radiate out of your cursor. Very useful on the low refresh rate LCDs where that cursor would appear like a submarine on the other side of the screen.

You can still do this (at least in Windows 7, the last time I checked.) Just look in the 'Mouse' section of your control panel, and select the one to make radiate circles around your mouse :)

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#128

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelGG wrote: post #73
supersan wrote: post #52

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associat…

> "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". Sure, if you use the word thinks . If you instead say "if msg.Contains "attach" then warn" it's not that impressive. The feature in the article is a bit more than a single if.

[deleted]

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#129

Post by hyperchase »

Maxious wrote: post #126
mmanfrin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar thought with Apple -- El Cap has a feature where if you shake your mouse around, the cursor will momentarily grow in size so you can find where it is. That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.

I seem to recall the Microsoft Mouse drivers for Windows 95 had a key shortcut to make lines radiate out of your cursor. Very useful on the low refresh rate LCDs where that cursor would appear like a submarine on the other side of the screen.

It still has it, I use it because I lose my cursor on my dual monitors all the time.

Re: Computer, Respond to This Email

#130

Post by morgosmaci »

Zelphyr wrote: post #53
imh wrote: post #29

I appreciate the privacy standards they used (no humans reading your email to develop this), but am concerned that it's not enough. As I understand with language models, overfitting takes the form of returning a sequence of words seen in the training set. If this is overfitting in any part of the response space, this could happen. Out of a million emails, how many suggested responses are going to substantively resemb…

Much of this strikes me as a "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" issue. Google clearly loves machine learning and doing cool things but I think lately they've been taking it too far. For example; after purchasing a book on Amazon recently I happened to do a Google search on that book and the first thing I see is, "Your book is scheduled to be delivered on..." Aside from the creepy factor I'm left wonderin…

On http://myaccount.google.com you can go into search settings and turn off "Private Results" and it will not return GMail search results.

Edit: It is under Your personal info -> Search settings -> Manage settings

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