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Should Calls From Google's 'Duplex' System Include Initial Warning Announcements? (vortex.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the heads-up dept.

Yesterday at its I/O developer conference, 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." Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein argues that the new system should come with some sort of warning to let the other person on the line know that they are talking with a computer: With no exceptions so far, the sense of these reactions has confirmed what I suspected -- that people are just fine with talking to automated systems so long as they are aware of the fact that they are not talking to another person. They react viscerally and negatively to the concept of machine-based systems that have the effect (whether intended or not) of fooling them into believing that a human is at the other end of the line. To use the vernacular: "Don't try to con me, bro!" Luckily, there's a relatively simple way to fix this problem at this early stage -- well before it becomes a big issue impacting many lives.

I believe that all production environment calls (essentially, calls not being made for internal test purposes) from Google's Duplex system should be required by Google to include an initial verbal warning to the called party that they have been called by an automated system, not by a human being -- the exact wording of that announcement to be determined.
UPDATE (5/10/18): Google now says Duplex will identify itself to humans.

47 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by LetterRip · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why should they? There is no logical reason for them to do so. If the bot works as well in reality as it did in the three demos, thern there is no reason to 'warn' the person on the other end that it is a bot.

    Also if the bot can't respond it seamlessly hands off to a call service employee, so there shouldn't be any issues with the bot wasting the time of the reservation takers time.

    1. Re:Why? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, it is in Google's best interest to not announce it and to just pass it off as human if they can possibly do so. If the person is told something unexpected (if they don't know what Google Assistant is) they may very well get confused, or may insist on not dealing with it. Then Google Assistant has already failed ad that call. And if it fails at enough calls users will stop using this function entirely as it is unreliable. The reliability of Google Duplex requires the people it talks to to be just as reliable as the Google Assistant end. Sometimes the best way to accomplish that is to Keep It Simple. No need to communicate details that are ultimately irrelevant.

      Of course, as others have pointed out there might be legal aspects to this, such as recording laws and laws about robocalls. I can't speak to those.

    2. Re:Why? by rsmith-mac · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why should they?

      Because getting jerked around by a computer sucks. Doubleplus so if it's one pretending to be a human.

      I legitimately feel sorry for service workers who are going to have to take orders from Duplex. It seems oddly dehumanizing to be ordered around by a machine.

    3. Re:Why? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Funny

      Expectations mean a lot.

      I think people are already getting used to calls from chatbots. I have received several. I didn't realize they weren't human until I went "off script" and the bot said "Let me get someone to help you with that."

      Google is doing something that may be iteratively better, with a deeper flowchart, but it is not really new.

      In the near future, people will just presume that any call from a business is a chatbot. We will have our own chatbots to deal with them. Hopefully, they will be able to resolve most issues without involving a human on either end.

    4. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      uhh. YES THEY SHOULD have a warning at the very start of the call..

      not only is it a computer, operated by a third party, pretending to be a person.. but also, GOOGLE IS RECORDING THE CALLS (not everyone is in a 'one party' jurisdiction) and such a notice would be ***REQUIRED BY LAW***

    5. Re:Why? by Hallux-F-Sinister · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Have you ever called someone's residence, and had a small child answer the phone? The issue is that even if you can't tell it immediately, you're dealing with someone not smart enough to handle the phone call. Suppose you are with the power company, and you dial a household to advise them that a gas leak in their area necesitates their evacuation or to find out if they smell gas, and the person who answers is a 5-year old. Do you tell your boss that you warned them, knowing that the person you spoke with on the phone was a small child? Or do you, rather, ask kindly, "is your mommy or daddy home?" etc., to speak to someone you can reasonably presume to be competent to get everyone to safety or intelligently answer your question about whether or not there is the telltale aroma of a gas leak there?

      Until someone comes up with an AI that can beat every Turing Test thrown at it, because it actually IS intelligent, I'll thank the people programming them NOT to try to get them to pretend they're "smart," and by the way, they're not. The machine is NOT passing a Turing Test if no one is actually ADMINISTERING one. To suggest that one HAS done so is like suggesting that if someone rings up a private residence, and a legal child answers the phone, (meaning someone under the age of majority, in the US of A being under the age of 18 years,) and the person calling can't tell that he or she has NOT in fact spoken to someone who is legally an adult, that the child who answered should be CONSIDERED an adult for all purposes, and be allowed to act in his or her own stead as a legal adult, i.e., buying a car or realestate, signing up for the armed services, or entering into other legal contracts, purchasing tobacco, etc. That's just silly. Being able to fool SOME people who weren't looking out for it does NOT prove general competence, any more than some man who puts on a dress and makeup convincing a casual passer-by, or indeed even several, or many, that he is a woman MEANS that he is, and should be considered a woman henceforth.

      I have myself encountered this sort of thing dialing into Apple's tech support and run into their very human sounding AI, and it's super-frustrating because you have to convince this goddamned stupid machine to LET you talk to a person, when it's designed to try to prevent it. In some cases, it works well, because you have a simple question you can concisely state, and it's PROGRAMMED to understand: "Hi," it says, "I'm an automated system capable of understanding full sentences. Please tell me what you're calling about." If you can reply, "My Apple TV stopped working," it might reply, "you're having problems with your Apple TV. Is that right?" To this, you can say, "yes," and it says, "okay, I'll get someone to help you."

      But every now and again, your problem is not one it's programmed to grapple with, because it's uncommon, and even a fairly stupid human would get it. For example, if it asks, "Please tell me what you're calling about." and you reply, "I can't get my iPod out of my anus!" or something, I don't think it would know what to tell you. A human would probably ask you to confirm, "did you say your iPod is... I'm sorry, it sounded like you said it was stuck in your... anus?" and you say, "yes, I thought it might be funny to shove it up my ass, and now it's stuck," he or she would probably helpfully suggest going to a hospital, for help having it removed, and maybe even provide tips on how to clean it to minimize the risk of water damage resulting from the moist environment of your rectum. You think the AI could do that? In truth, having no iPod, and never having shoved one up anyone's ass, let alone my own, (nor anything ELSE, for that matter,) I can't say whether or not the AI they have answering the phone would or would not be able to help in that scenario, though I have a sneaking suspicion it would NOT.

      So if they reach a point where they are good enough to fool people who aren't looking to see if they're human, I'

      --
      Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
    6. Re:Why? by Tom · · Score: 2

      Also if the bot can't respond it seamlessly hands off to a call service employee, so there shouldn't be any issues with the bot wasting the time of the reservation takers time.

      And you buy that?

      To gain any advantage of having a human make the call in the first place, the system needs to be autonomous, i.e. the call center agent is not listening in all the time.

      So when you "seamlessly" hand over, you hand over to a person who until one second ago had no insight into the call that is happening. He might have some information on his screen, but it won't be seamless and information will be lost or repeated.

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    7. Re:Why? by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because getting jerked around by a computer sucks.

      Implying you're getting jerked around. If this computer is no different than a human, then hang up on them if you're being jerked around. Or maybe they are making an appointment with you for their owner.

      Do you hate secretaries too?

    8. Re:Why? by cyba · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > I legitimately feel sorry for service workers who are going to have to take orders from Duplex.
      > It seems oddly dehumanizing to be ordered around by a machine.

      Soon all these service workers will be replaced by Duplex (or its competitor) as well, so it will be only some other AI that will get dehumanized :-/

    9. Re:Why? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That was my reaction too, but on reflection it's actually quite complex.

      Where do you draw the line? What if it's someone with a disability using assistive technology to set up an appointment. Should they be required to disclose their disability to you in order to get permission to use a digital assistant?

      We are a long way from strong AI, but the parallels with how certain groups were treated in the past is striking. Some people expect trans people to declare themselves and their anatomy up front, for example.

      If this stuff doesn't matter then we have to ask if AI vs. human matters, or if other things like politeness and efficient and effective communication are.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:Why? by Bongo · · Score: 2

      Yeah. There's the notion of voice as an interface, as in, I am operating a machine. And people learn what the interface can do. Pull leaver to press burger patty. And then there's humans beings, who are arguably just more complicated machines, but the point is, you can explain things to a human being and expect understanding of all sorts of things. I remember one fantastic, to their credit, support call, where the tech person could understand my predicament, and he understood that the rules, the script, did not solve my problem (according to the script, I did not have a problem), so he made some really useful suggestions about classifying the issue slightly differently, and having the empathy to check with me whether I was willing to try this other way (there was a risk of it incurring a bill, and was I willing to take that risk), and so on. Anyway, it set me down a path which got the problem fixed and things were even better than before. He passed the brilliant tech support person test.

    11. Re:Why? by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I legitimately feel sorry for service workers who are going to have to take orders from Duplex. It seems oddly dehumanizing to be ordered around by a machine.

      I spend all day being fed bug reports from a machine. And yet even though the message was delivered to my by our bug tracking software, it ultimately originated from the intent of a human being.

      I spend all day responding to emails (and posts on /.) delivered by a machine. But I assume that you are not a bot and that even though this interaction was mediated by machines, it serves our common human purpose.

      When I worked in food service, I spent all day being ordered to prepare food by tiny slips of paper with horrible handwriting on one of those turny-things. I hope that the food being made was ultimately consumed by humans though.

      At the end, you seem to be arguing that it is more dehumanizing to be relayed orders by a machine that emulates flapping meat sounds in meat-English as opposed to receiving those orders by reading off a computer screen or on a slip of paper. Perhaps you are right (after all, this is subjective) but it seems that the crux of your claim is that voice is different, not that you are 'ordered around by a machine'.

    12. Re: Why? by iggymanz · · Score: 2

      Which is totally different than being recorded by the owners of the 3rd world shithole camel jockey script readers...

    13. Re:Why? by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Right.... I just want a law that any chatbot used on the telephone must NOT attempt to lie or deceive and MUST answer truthfully, in particular, when asked questions about the call or itself, Must answer all such questions to the full extent without hanging up the call, attempting to misdirect, or attempting to transfer the call to another person or line, such as "Is this an automatic call?", "Do I have an account with your company?", "Is this call a solicitation or sales call?", "Are you a chatbot?", and, about the company that made or accepted the call, and about the chatbot operator's client whom they are making the call on behalf of, and the listing of any chain of 3rd parties engaging the client --- the Chatbot must provide their complete name, Addresses, and Registered agent names and addresses for All upon request.

    14. Re:Why? by mysidia · · Score: 2

      I legitimately feel sorry for service workers who are going to have to take orders from Duplex. It seems oddly dehumanizing to be ordered around by a machine.

      They're not being "ordered around by a machine". They are employed by a human, and the employee's job is to record the appointment being scheduled or order for goods being made, so their business can service the order ----- Think of it like an E-commerce employee: it is the same deal.... Orders come in from online customers on a specialized website, and an employee watching prints off the order to be executed.

      That would work in the service industry true, BUT the only problems are....

      (1) Most small service companies don't have a website suitable for ecommerce, and the custom programming is expensive

      (2) The problem with Ecommerce websites in general is there's no "standardized" interface provided to allow you to make an automated order for goods or services through a 3rd party tool --- how are you supposed to tell your Google Home... "OK Google, get a hot pizza delivered"; If all the restaurants have bespoke websites only designed for use by humans, but no standardized interface, AND 90% of them only take orders by the phone, because they're small business, and the tens of thousands to invest in custom website development doesn't make sense in their mind for the small number of online orders they'd be expected to receive?.

    15. Re:Why? by mysidia · · Score: 3, Informative

      What makes you think a machine can enter a legally binding contract?

      Your secretary making the call on your behalf to setup an appointment or order goods does not enter you into a legally binding contract, either --- it's a good faith order, but not binding until goods or money have been exchanged and accepted by the otherparty.

      In this case, the contract is not "made" until you receive goods or make payment.

    16. Re:Why? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      What makes you think a machine can enter a legally binding contract?

      Fuck me that escalated quickly. Guess what: 99% of the things you do over the phone are not legally binding in any form.

  2. They all have the same name by lazarus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When the bot called the hair salon it started the call by saying "Hi, I'm calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."

    You can solve this problem by changing this to: "Hi, this is Alexa (or Google whatever) calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."

    This will take the masses about 30 seconds to adapt to and we can dispense with all the drama. At this point there is no need for them to have different names.

    Sometime in the future when they're sentient and want to talk to each other that will have to change.

    --
    I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
    1. Re:They all have the same name by Zaelath · · Score: 2

      Just "this is Alexa" might be confusing, humans can be called Alexa. All these calls should start with *KLAXON* WARNING, the following voice is simulated, please listen after the beep *BEEP*

      Additionally, we should have those guys walking in front of cars waving red flags/lanterns again, horseless carriages are just too creepy. Oh and the electric ones should have to play a tape of horse hooves loudly.

    2. Re:They all have the same name by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Anyone who's worked in retail would probably tell you they'd prefer the bot.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:They all have the same name by Bongo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A business might have a policy that they neeed to talk to a real person. Automated calls could be the result of malware. Someone could DDOS a small business, filling their booking with fake entries for weeks.

    4. Re:They all have the same name by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      You can solve this problem by changing this to: "Hi, this is Alexa (or Google whatever) calling on behalf of a client and would like to book..."

      What problem? You jumped straight to the solution, but reading through the summary and the posts here first we really should define if this is a problem at all. I know what is a problem: reduced efficacy due to people having bias against talking to computers. If this increases the hang-up rate and makes it less useful than that would be a problem.

    5. Re:They all have the same name by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 2

      Anyone who's worked in retail would probably tell you they'd prefer the bot.

      As would anybody who works in prostitution :D

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

  3. FFS by Zalbik · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why on earth would we want to spend taxpayer money or government resources on this sort of thing?!?

    This is the exact sort of thing that the free market should decide. If you need this degree of coddling, please see a psychologist as you have a serious phobia.

    No, No, and...hell no.

  4. Self-importance alert. by ColaMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I believe that......

    And I don't. Seeing as we're both not Google, our opinions on this topic are pretty much moot.

    --

    You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
    There is a lot of hype here.
    1. Re:Self-importance alert. by arth1 · · Score: 2

      And I don't. Seeing as we're both not Google, our opinions on this topic are pretty much moot.

      Not so. You have wallets, that Google truly needs you to open for its customers, so they in turn will shower Google with green.
      That's a power right there.
      Alienating a large portion of your potential customer base is generally not good business.

  5. Hangups by sgunhouse · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't know about you, but if I get a call from an automated system I just hang up. If the call starts off immediately by saying it is automated I'm sure that is what will happen. The first thing that has to happen is to indicate to the recipient what the call is about; after that they can say (especially if there is a response the system doesn't understand) that they are a machine.

    1. Re:Hangups by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      I don't know about you, but if I get a call from an automated system I just hang up.

      As do I. But I still feel as if there should be an easy and obvious way for me to make that determination.

      At first thought, anyway, this "Duplex" thing rather annoys me. If the "person" on whose behalf the bot is calling doesn't feel it is worth their time to speak to me directly, why should I have to waste my time talking to their bot?

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    2. Re:Hangups by LetterRip · · Score: 5, Insightful

      At first thought, anyway, this "Duplex" thing rather annoys me. If the "person" on whose behalf the bot is calling doesn't feel it is worth their time to speak to me directly, why should I have to waste my time talking to their bot?

      This bot makes reservations. As an employee of the company that the reservation is being made at, you wouldn't be "wasting your time" - you would be doing your job.

    3. Re:Hangups by Guillermito · · Score: 2

      if I get a call from an automated system I just hang up

      This is because the vast majority of calls we get from automated systems now are unsolicited and aimed at parting us with our money. On the other hand, businesses are eager to get the kind of calls that Google demoed. Plus the robot seemed very polite and down to business. I'm pretty sure client facing employees would love to talk to the Google AI bot instead of dealing with rude, incoherent, indecisive human customers.

    4. Re:Hangups by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I completely agree. But there are times where Duplex could be useful.

      "Ok Google, call the radio show. I need to be the 99th caller to win.", "Ok Google, buy me this ticket for this show before it gets sold out.", "Ok Google, call Xfinity, pretend that I want to move to AT&T unless they cut me a new discounted rate", "Ok Google, pretend you're an elderly woman and waste as much of this scammer's time as possible.", "Ok Google, please pick up whenever my mother-in-law calls. Tell her I am busy. Ask her what she wants and send me a summary of her complaints by SMS."

    5. Re:Hangups by bazorg · · Score: 2

      But there are times where Duplex could be useful.

      Perhaps that guy from Pulp Fiction who had a speech impediment and still wants to order pizza from a place that does not do ecommerce.

      Plenty of other scenarios can be imagined, involving people who work 9-5 and cannot be in the phone queue for some service that is also only open 9-5.

      This can also be seen as a good way to avoid dodgy upselling. My robot is calling for the offer X that was advertised and your selling bot can argue for hours that there's a better deal, but I won't take it.

  6. cut out the people by petes_PoV · · Score: 2

    With luck, soon both sides: the appointment-making and the reservation-taking will be given over to the machines. So this will simply be my Duplex calling your Duplex. I can see some benefits to each of them knowing they are talking to (essentially) themself, that way they could both hang up and negotiate whatever the call was about far more efficiently in a few milliseconds.

    It is only while there is the possibility that one system is so archaic that it still has an actual person taking the call that there is a difficulty. But even then, it's not much of an issue, what with the Duplex system being backwards compatible with meat.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
    1. Re:cut out the people by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If a Duplex realizes it's talking to another Duplex, will it go into 56K modem mode and just talk electronically?

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  7. Re:The real question is... by guruevi · · Score: 2

    People get what they want, easier and faster.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  8. Getting this ready for telemarketers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I want this ready to keep up a conversation with a telemarketer.

  9. Demonstrates misunderstanding of AI by aberglas · · Score: 2

    It is very difficult to know whether these machines are intelligent or not. If they are just playing to some fairly fixed scripts then as long as the person at the other end stays within the script then no real intelligence is needed. Eliza/Doctor did this sort of thing 50 years ago by simple pattern recognition on sentences.

    Sure, this system is smarter than Eliza (hopefully), but I suspect that the moment you go off script it fails catastrophically. The human would soon tweak that they were talking to an automated bot (even if they were actually talking to another human that was not too smart!).

    These things have the potential to be really annoying.

    Eventually, they may know what a restaurant booking really is beyond the superficial words and phrases. At that point people will be redundant. But that is still decades away.

  10. Re:Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to the latest LLVM debacle, yes. White males like me are indeed being specifically singled out, targeted, and attacked. It is hateful, racist and has as much place in our society as any other gender or racial bias.

    Or are you saying it is okay to discriminate against me? Because that is the vibe I am getting from google and many others. I have never discriminated against anyone before and I'll be damned if I will let it happen to me.

    Your not the first one to say that I am 'crying' because I am white, *hint* your still a racist asshole no matter who your being racist against.

    Figuring it is A-OKAY because I am white just proves my point.

  11. Observer Effect by mykro76 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That would defeat the purpose of training the AI on genuine human conversations. If the recipient knew it was an AI calling they would be likely to change their behaviour such as talking in shorter, simpler sentences with overly exaggerated pronunciation.

  12. 0 != O by WaxParadigm · · Score: 2

    Don't know about the announcement, but after listening to the calls I think someone should teach Duplex that round digits in phone numbers are zeros (not the letter o).

  13. abuse by Tom · · Score: 2

    I'm much less concerned about the "omg the person I was talking to wasn't actually a person" and much more about the abuse potential of the whole thing.

    A lot of the real world works because as human beings we can generally trust each other, exceptions are rare enough to not break the system and a personal interaction establishes a slim line of bidirectional trust.

    If you have access to such a system, and I'm certain they will make it generally available, there's a business there, you can now flood the restaurant or hairdresser etc you didn't like with fake reservations, denying them actual business.

    They will have to answer with verification systems, which a) makes everything more complicated for us actual humans and b) adds a small overhead and c) just starts the arms race we already know from IT security.

    And that is just the very first thing that comes to mind. Criminals are sure to be more creative than that. These systems are disruptive, and I haven't seen anyone thinking about solutions to that so far. Maybe the world after we solve this will be better than the world now, but it will be a major change. I'm reasonably sure that reservations of all kinds via telephone will go away. When the dust settles, you will no longer call a restaurant to ask for a table. You will tell your smartphone to reserve one, which will then call the restaurants computer, they will manage the verification and validation details in the background and generate a token that you can show at the entrance to get your table.

    I'm a tech person, I feel comfortable with that. I would probably prefer it over calling the restaurant and speaking to a real person and we barely understand each other because of the noise in the background, etc. - but many people prefer to actually interact with an actual human being and that will be lost to them.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  14. DOA by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 2

    I believe that all production environment calls (essentially, calls not being made for internal test purposes) from Google's Duplex system should be required by Google to include an initial verbal warning to the called party that they have been called by an automated system, not by a human being -- the exact wording of that announcement to be determined.

    OK First this right here is a major hurdle. If you make this thing warn people it's a robocall, most folks will just hang up immediately, thinking it's yet another sales pitch, or free cruise, or health insurance, gawd there's so many now. So this is DOA if it's gotta announce it's automated.

    But as a side note, it's going to be amusing when our 'AI's start calling each other to whatever, communicating in simulated english or whatever spoken language the systems in question are trained on.

    Obviously the real solution is for your hair stylist and favorite restaurant have some non-verbal mechanism for arranging appointments or reservations or whatever. Obviously every one and every company and every little this and that can't have their own App for achieving this, which is what some larger companies are doing to migrate 'ordering stuff' from humans talking to humans to humans just fondling their portable personal computer.

    I'm imagine whomever cobbles such a system together and convinces a large segment of the population to use it is going to be rich. But this Duplex thing? DOA. The stigma surrounding robocalls is all bad, and all deserved I'm afraid.

  15. Re: Competing against 3rd world call centers by iggymanz · · Score: 2

    Yes I'd rather have warning I will be speaking to a resident of a 3rd world shithole reading from a script who has never used the product

  16. Re:Why a warning? Robocalls are illegal. by kent.dickey · · Score: 2

    I agree, this would appear to be an illegal robocall. I don't understand how Google doesn't realize this is a problem.

    For those in favor of this, what would you think of v2.0 of the appointment robot automatically calling ALL restaurants within a 5 mile radius to book a table? And there's no reason all the calls cannot be simultaneous. And then calling back ALL-1 to cancel. Restaurants will need to hire a team to staff their phones (or, just automate it as well...this may be what Google has in mind, force businesses to automate their phones as well). And then v3.0 is competitors abuse the system: do something to get users of this product to Denial-of-Service their competitors. It's obvious that any automated call system is ripe for abuse by unsavory actors by tricking normal people to do something abusive.

    And, lowly workers now have to grovel at the sounds of the automated butlers of the rich. I would expect a backlash.

  17. Obvious Google baloney by JustNiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > With no exceptions so far, the sense of these reactions has confirmed what I suspected -- that people are just fine with talking to automated systems so long as they are aware of the fact that they are not talking to another person.

    Let me be the first then. I hate the damn things, and I REALLY can't believe that I am exceptional in that respect.

  18. Robocallers? by WillyWanker · · Score: 2

    And when will this apply to robocallers, spammers, and debt collectors who use pre-recorded messages that try to trick people into thinking a human is calling them? Y'know, shit that they've been doing for over a decade and without anyone even raising an eyebrow.

    If Google is going to be required to disclose it's an AI call, then all robocallers should have to as well.

  19. Polite to say who you are. by gurps_npc · · Score: 2

    They should introduce themselves like this:

    "Hello, this is Google's Duplex, calling for John Doe. John would like a table for two at 6 PM this Saturday....."

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com