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Google Assistant Will Call Businesses For You Via 'Duplex' (qz.com)
At its I/O developer conference today, Google debuted "Duplex," an AI system for accomplishing real world tasks over the phone. "To show off its capabilities, CEO Sundar Pichai played two recordings of Google Assistant running Duplex, scheduling a hair appointment and a dinner reservation," reports Quartz. "In each, the person picking up the phone didn't seem to realize they were talking to a computer. The conversations proceed back-and-forth to find the right time, and confirm what the customer wanted. Even when conversations didn't go as expected, the assistant understood the context, responded appropriately, and carried on the task. (You can listen to the recordings here.)" From the report: It's a far more natural conversation than consumers may be used to with digital assistants. The AI's voice lacks a stilted cadence and comes complete with "ums" and natural pauses (which also helps cover up the fact that it is still processing). It uses the phone's on-board processing, as well as the cloud, to deliver the right response with just the right amount of pause.
Google is taking advantage of its primary asset: data. It trained Duplex on a massive body of "anonymized phone conversations," according to a release. Every scheduling task will have its own problems to solve when arranging a specific type of appointment, but all will be underpinned by Google's massive volume of data from searches and recordings that will help the AI hold a conversation. Still, the technology cannot carry on just any conversation. Even though Duplex can seemingly handle far more context than other systems, it only works within a narrow set of queries (Google hasn't listed all of them yet). And despite releasing six new more natural sounding voices for the Assistant product available today, none approached the humanity of its Duplex example.
Google is taking advantage of its primary asset: data. It trained Duplex on a massive body of "anonymized phone conversations," according to a release. Every scheduling task will have its own problems to solve when arranging a specific type of appointment, but all will be underpinned by Google's massive volume of data from searches and recordings that will help the AI hold a conversation. Still, the technology cannot carry on just any conversation. Even though Duplex can seemingly handle far more context than other systems, it only works within a narrow set of queries (Google hasn't listed all of them yet). And despite releasing six new more natural sounding voices for the Assistant product available today, none approached the humanity of its Duplex example.
1. More ways that Google (and 'partner companies', I'm sure) can track more aspects of your life.
1a. More opportunities for hackers to pry your personal data from you.
1b. More opportunities for criminal hackers to commit fraud (fraudulent purchases via hacked 'digital assistant', etc).
2. More depersonalization of your interactions with other people.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
4. Less opportunities for people to develop their interpersonal skills/be properly socialized.
Holy abuse potential, Batman!!
I guess we'll just have to forget about the telephone as an on-balance helpful form of communication..
-- Mike Greaves
Businesses will use their own digital assistants to answer calls, so we'll end up living in a bizarre alternate universe where computers phone each other and have conversations to schedule our lives. Abbreviated botspeak will eventually supplant standard English, as humans mimic the mannerisms and verbal shortcuts used by impatient digital assistant apps.
And despite releasing six new more natural sounding voices for the Assistant product available today, none approached the humanity of its Duplex example.
There is a big difference in what Google can do and what they can do en masse. You may have also noticed a statement today about efforts in optimizing trained networks. The more complex networks aren't economical to run millions of times a day. Parallel work is under way both in hardware and algorithms to change that.
Duplex is not being deployed today because the compute costs are high enough that it is not yet economical to deploy.
Similarly, the voice we hear from the Assistant differs greatly from their best in-house efforts on those same voices. It is from a more energy optimized model.
An everyday example of this can be self-demonstrated with Google Maps in the driving mode. Some of the voice commands are produced by the server and sound very nice. Others are produced directly on the phone and sound like text to speech engines from previous decades. I'm not sure what the criteria are for using a locally produced direction versus one from the server, perhaps it loses the cell tower for a moment. But, you'll know it when you hear it.
Bart [calling]: Is Oliver there?
Moe: Who?
Bart: Oliver Klozoff.
Moe: Hold on, I'll check. Paging Oliver Klozoff! Oliver Klozoff!...
Table-ized A.I.
Where did they get this body of "anonymized phone conversations"?
Is it from Google Voice? Is it from Android phones calling home?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
4. Less opportunities for people to develop their interpersonal skills/be properly socialized.
Maybe it's just introversion, but avoiding interactions with random other human beings is a massive benefit to this tech.
And the reason is the "other human beings" lack interpersonal skills (like empathy and courtesy) and particularly the children in starter jobs that tend to answer the phones, no amount of forcing me to interact with assholes is going to make me dread it less.
Wow, this will save me like five minutes a week!
Assuming the failure rate isn't horrendous, and then instead of talking to some front-line person with a service incentive to quickly make a reservation or appointment, I'll be talking to an overwhelmed backend support person trying to fix a screw-up. So 19 times out of 20, you'll save 90 seconds, and the other time you'll lose 45 minutes.
Tom Smykowski, he's a people person. I hope you can get downloadable voices.
Just turn this loose on the robocallers. It should tie them up for a long time.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Many of our locations are still on dial-up since they're mostly in the Seattle area. I would love to be able to use an offline AI. We used wit.ai before they were bought out by Facebook, and it worked great with our locations with fast Internet access (about >512bps). It did a great job of determining customer "intents" to use their term. Too bad it didn't work well over dial-up and after they were acquired by Facebook, their system now doesn't work well at all.
Avoiding people who lack interpersonal skills doesn't help either them or you. Insane.
Thanks to the Directors Rules and progressive Seattle government, Seattle enjoys some of the highest Internet access speeds on the planet. 1Gbps is common. There are over 28 ISPs in Seattle offering high speed Internet.
Sounds like you're a lot of fun on a first date. :D
Why, so you can regress even further into social isolation and alienation?
She immediately started talking about debt collectors talking to your digital assistant. I said no the debt collectors will be automated too so it will be them talking at each other.
They are fucking creepy as hell too.
Thankfully past dating, but it's certainly a much different Risk vs Reward situation than "booking a table at short notice".
Not really, without practice, it falls off :)
Google has workedâ"unsuccessfullyâ"for years to make a decent chat app and had to shelve it, but your phone can make appointements for you and might actually confuse people into thinking it's a real person?
Sounds like Google is trying to re-enact the scene from the full-length version of Advantageous where the main character finds out her assistant/coach was an AI the whole time.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I already tend to answer a call only if I have the caller number in my contacts.
It's maybe rude but I found out that I'm not missing anything, really.
Anyone I want to potentially contact me has and can use instant messaging apps or even SMS if they're old school.
And I have a fixed phone only because it comes with the Internet access. It's mostly disconnected. There has been too much abuse of it, for really making you want to use the telephone for anything else than calling businesses for making an appointment (as in the article above), or chatting with persons in your circle of acquaintances.
From Wikipedia:
It seems, we are about to arrive...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Like the second example on their blog, where it tries to make a reservation at a Chinese restaurant, and the lady has a thick accent?
Just let Google Duplex handle all flirting and dating smalltalk tasks, it's for the best... :-)
Phones haven't been useful for a decade or more.
People will learn to recognise these things and hang up on them, or at least pass them to their own AI assistant.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You need the Telecrapper2000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Hello, this is Google Assistant, I assume you are at lunch right now, are you happy with your long distance provider? ....
During the presentation, this was placed as a kind of bridge technology for businesses that don't have a digital reservation system yet. (OpenTable or whatever there is for hairdressers and doctors)
So as soon as they have something electronic, in place to reserve timeslots, Duplex will be obsolete.
Related question: Anyone else thought this would have been a fantastic April Fools story?
bickerdyke
2. More depersonalization of your interactions with other people.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
"Have your digital assistant call my digital assistant to schedule an appointment."
Just let Google Duplex handle all flirting and dating smalltalk tasks,
Made me think of this video (around 2:45, the guys uses a "wingman" app to help on his date).
Of course, the creepiest part is a few of the current "big AI companies" probably have the kind of data resource to attempt training this kind of stuff for real.
(And some like Uber are already training simple systems to spot one-night-stands in their database).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes"
'may' instead of 'are', because that way when they screw up, they can claim that your particular conversation wasn't recorded.
Why would Google waste time and effort on a bot that calls a phone to make an appointment? I rather see them invent a system that makes it easy and inexpensive for any business to receive and confirm appointments online. I want to make reservations or a doc appointment at 10 at night. What good does a bot do when at that time only a different bot will be picking up the phone at best?
1. More ways that Google (and 'partner companies', I'm sure) can track more aspects of your life.
Meh. Anyone using this is going to be putting the appointment on their Google calendar anyway.
1a. More opportunities for hackers to pry your personal data from you.
How so?
1b. More opportunities for criminal hackers to commit fraud (fraudulent purchases via hacked 'digital assistant', etc).
How so? Hacking your digital assistant would mean hacking Google's servers. If they can do that, I fail to see how the digital assistant makes anything worse.
2. More depersonalization of your interactions with other people.
Yeah, because calling to make appointments really helps you keep in touch with humanity. <sarcasm/>.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
Opportunities to avoid meaningless, content-free, time-wasting interactions with people. Actually, this is just a stopgap. What we really need is for salons, restaurants, etc., to provide online scheduling APIs. All the fancy natural language processing is just to cover this deficiency.
4. Less opportunities for people to develop their interpersonal skills/be properly socialized.
If you're so isolated that making reservations is a significant part of your interpersonal interaction, you have a real problem.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
But also, 'may' can be interpreted as 'giving permission' as in 'YOU may record this for monitoring purposes'. One could argue this gives you permission to record the calls yourself.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
I think this should be effective against tele-spammers too:
http://www.jollyrogertelco.com...
It's not AI, but it's better in a way because the timed responses will talk over the caller and interrupt them.
Forcing interaction doesn't help either.
Well, for your kids' sake, I certainly hope you're socializing them properly (with real people in person, not so-called 'social media') and not allowing them to become antisocial/socially avoidant hermits. There's already too much of that in the world and it's not a good thing.
What a load of garbage. CenturyLink is testing gigabit on a couple of streets. It is not available to the vast majority of the city. As to the 28 claim, what does that matter if the city only allows one of two of them to offer service at your address?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
2. More depersonalization of your interactions with other people.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
Were these supposed to be negatives?
"Without practice"? I think it's way, way, way too much practice in a short time which makes it fall off.
That or leprosy.
I may be mis-remembering this, but the NSA tapped 500M+ pin logs last year based on a court authorization to investigate just 40 people.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
My gut (which isn't science) says putting people in situations where they have to communicate with other people helps them learn to communicate.
Putting people in situations does. When they are ready and willing to do so.
Forcing people into situations does not. Instead, it triggers the recoil effect and drives them away from further communication.
Your gut is a terrible psychologist.
So when my Duplex is talking to some company's bot, it's just two computers communicating at a really really low data rate?
J
Maybe they can get the hours correct finally if they call and ask. POS tells me everything is closed all the time.
or at least pass them to their own AI assistant
Or why not just have your AI assistant answering the phone calls from the other AIs. It's the peak of bloated, inefficient, and overly expensive ordering systems. I write systems that can place hundreds of orders a second. These new AI systems will be able to place one order every one hundred seconds.