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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.
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.
Avoiding people who lack interpersonal skills doesn't help either them or you. Insane.
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.
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?
I rather see them invent a system that makes it easy and inexpensive for any business to receive and confirm appointments online.
There are many of those that already exist. All of them are incompatible with each other, and everyone is pushing their own "standard".
Place-phone-call is about the closest thing we have to a standard.
If your response is "Then Google should push it's own standard", 1) they already do, and 2) https://xkcd.com/927/