Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ai.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 786 posts

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

#771

Post by darkmighty »

akvadrako wrote: post #770
darkmighty wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean they're doing pretty well by Turing's original definition. I agree chatbots using traditional techniques (not sure about newer LSTM chatbots) are not too impressive, just illustrating that we've had to adjust the definition. That's by definition moving the target.

In fact I'm quite sure Turing would be quite impressed by good recent chatbots.

Try this one: https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/

From the point of view of the 1940s, this would seem really close to a veritable "Thinking machine"! Although I'm sure he'd recognize a few things are still missing to fully replicating human behavior (or going beyond).

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

#773

Post by freyir »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #623
smadge wrote: post #507

Earlier 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 that's the reason why Duplex is interesting, and why there's a grain of truth in what ZainRiz is saying:

Humans have settled on a de facto API for scheduling appointments. It uses the telephone as its interface, speech as its medium, and Duplex is exploiting it.

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

#774

Post by sowbug »

8bitchemistry wrote: post #472
sowbug wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of the maybe apocryphal story how NASA invested time, money, and effort to develop a pen so astronauts could write in zero gravity, and the Soviets used pencils.

A great story, but you are correct about it being apocryphal: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/

And one internet binge later, I am now the proud owner of a matte black Fisher 400B Space Bullet Space Pen. Cool story. (The real one, I mean.)

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

#776

Post by cjonas »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #672
xroche wrote: post #638

Earlier 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)

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…

The "badges" are not won in competions, but instead watered down tutorial gold stars. Instead of targeting real programmers Salesforce built "trailhead" for John in finance who wrote some Excel macro and decided he should become a Salesforce "developer". Thats why the small percentage of us consultants who actually come from a cs background can charge so much.

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

#777

Post by [deleted] »

nfoz wrote: post #463
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…

> People are prejudiced against talking to bots because of how bad they are currently I'm prejudiced against talking to bots because they're bots. They don't have empathy, whereas from voice interaction I expect a human I can relate to and desire to help and be courteous with. It's a fundamentally different type of interaction and I will be annoyed anytime that one is confused for the other.

[deleted]

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

#778

Post by sitepodmatt »

cjonas wrote: post #776
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…

The "badges" are not won in competions, but instead watered down tutorial gold stars. Instead of targeting real programmers Salesforce built "trailhead" for John in finance who wrote some Excel macro and decided he should become a Salesforce "developer". Thats why the small percentage of us consultants who actually come from a cs background can charge so much.

I think I agree with your sentiment, but I'd think you'd be surprised how much a click next salesfarce developer charges...

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

#779

Post by tzm »

> This summer, we’ll start testing the Duplex technology within the Google Assistant, to help users make restaurant reservations, schedule hair salon appointments, and get holiday hours over the phone.

I don't see any details on how this is beyond the research phase.

Is Duplex a product or developer API?

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

#780

Post by hrasyid »

turdnagel wrote: post #350
hrasyid wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my initial reaction too, but APIs need work for coding, integration, testing, make sure data is sent in the right format, etc, while voice-robot-to-voice-robot will just work out of the box.

You're completely abstracting away all the coding, integration, testing, and "data formatting" (read: grammar) involved in Duplex, which seems to be much more complex than an REST API.

But each side only need to do it once right? At least once per language. No need to deal with interoperability with multiple APIs and integrations.
Post reply on HN