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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

#41

Post by politician »

542458 wrote: post #13

This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!

Credit card companies have already solved this problem by publishing a well-known 1-800 number that their customers can call back to verify the intent of an unexpected caller.

Google Duplex can do the same thing - without even staffing a call center.

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

#42

Post by chrisabrams »

There are plenty of places in my town that don't have online ordering or booking...this would (potentially) help with that...but really, I'd rather there be more tech be built around enabling theses companies to "be online" such as an online ordering or booking system. When I find a hair cut place, why can't I just book an appointment right from the Google Maps search? I'd rather have that type of convenience instead. Ironically they may add that at some point, and Duplex just calls on my behalf without me even knowing.

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

#43

Post by advisedwang »

jonknee wrote: post #34
politician wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until a Google Duplex caller "on behalf of a client" calls to schedule a reservation at a restaurant using Google Duplex to answer the phones.

The most inefficient API you could design!

But backwards compatible!

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

#44

Post by gowld »

Moto7451 wrote: post #29
cletus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common pattern. Lots of websites also have "establishing secure connection" interstitials for the same reason.

Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.

That's the opposite of what parent and other commenters are saying. Users prefer the loading animations, according to the growth hackers.

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

#45

Post by jdietrich »

cletus wrote: post #14
luckydata wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.

This is a pretty common pattern. Lots of websites also have "establishing secure connection" interstitials for the same reason.

It can be a more friendly way of rate-limiting expensive DB queries. An interstitial that says "too many queries, try again in 10 seconds" is far more annoying than a loading bar.

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

#46

Post by rayiner »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #12
politician wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, there should be an requirement to identify when challenged. "Are you a bot?" "Yes, I am Google Duplex v1.2. This call is being recorded; you can see our privacy policy and terms of service at http://google.com/duplex."

I agree, but the social pressure not to use it would be immense. Imagine the awkward moments where we start confronting people who call us and asking them if they're real.

It's already happening. I'm getting robo calls from some police donation fund that will slow down and restart speaking if you interrupt them (took me a few moments to realize it was a recording).

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

#47

Post by JeffreyKaine »

have_faith wrote: post #27

One positive thing about our dystopian future is that it will force us to meet up more in person, if only to confirm our friends are real.

If you can't tell if your AI friend is real, are they not a real friend? They might not be human, but they will still be your friend, no?

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

#48

Post by sarreph »

chrisabrams wrote: post #42

There are plenty of places in my town that don't have online ordering or booking...this would (potentially) help with that...but really, I'd rather there be more tech be built around enabling theses companies to "be online" such as an online ordering or booking system. When I find a hair cut place, why can't I just book an appointment right from the Google Maps search? I'd rather have that type of convenience instead…

> Ironically they may add that at some point, and Duplex just calls on my behalf without me even knowing.

Yup, good observation; seems highly likely, save for the 'without even knowing' bit... I would imagine you'd 'request to book' and an async Duplex operation would run in the background and send you a notification of the outcome / possibilities.

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

#49

Post by politician »

detaro wrote: post #32
politician wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until a Google Duplex caller "on behalf of a client" calls to schedule a reservation at a restaurant using Google Duplex to answer the phones.

I wonder if they detect that and solve whatever task it is directly then.

It'd be trivial to detect if they transmit high-frequency noise over the line, and then fallback to DTMF tones.

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

#50

Post by thawab »

jld wrote: post #3

In the case where the person on the other end isn't a native english speaker, (the calling a restaurant clip) why doesn't Google figure out what language they speak and speak it to them?

Currently I'm working on a similar project. Building a GAN (generative adversarial network) for voice is a lot of work and testing, you need a big dataset for labeled voices. Wavenet currently support English[0]. Also you need a neural NLP model for this language.

[0]https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices

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