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Google I/O'18: Keynote Livestream [video]
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoThere is some dystopian crud in here in just the few minutes I've watched. - Google will write your emails for you so you don't have to. Is this Gmail user writing me an email or is Google? I no longer know. - Google Assistant can now impose Google's parenting values on your kids by making them say please. Combine with the mandatory Chromebooks in my school district for full-on indoctrination from childhood. I am so uncomfortable with this. All the people cheering for it is even worse. EDIT: HOLY CRUD, they're unleashing their AI to call and harass people on the phone.
- sulam 8y agoTo be honest Gmail auto-replies have been amazingly on point for me. The reply options they give me in quick, transactional emails are generally _exactly_ the sort of reply I would have typed out, so they save me a lot of time.
- dragandj 8y agoUntil you train yourself to respond with such limited set of pre-baked answers to everything!
- sulam 8y agoWe don't know each other (I don't think!), but trust me, no one who knows me would believe you if you said I'm at risk of that!
- dragandj 8y agoMy comment does not implicate that you as a single person necessary have to succumb to this, at least immediately, or that you are not a good person in any way. By you, I implied every person using that technology over time, including me, you, and everyone else. Short-term, we might control this, but over time it is inevitable. Something that is done over and over again becomes automatic. That's called training and conditioning :)
- Osmium 8y agoYou can imagine a feedback loop though: Some people use Gmail auto-replies more > Other people therefore receive emails in the style of these auto-replies > These other people then start manually sending emails according to this style > More people then become happier using auto-reply (since it produces replies in a style they've come to expect) In this way, an auto-reply feature, even if used by only a subset of the population would start to move language trends. Maybe there's nothing wrong with this, I don't know. But there is a feedback loop there, which means there's a blurrier line than we'd like between "this AI algorithm does what I'd expect" to "my expectations have become shaped by AI algorithms."
- earthboundkid 8y agoThis happened to Google Translate. They were scouring the web looking for bilingual corpuses to ingest and they found… texts translated by Google Translate. Things got funky and they had to stop.
- anderber 8y agoI'm not sure I agree 100% with what you said, but I get the sentiment. If someone is worried about a dystopian crud, why would they purchase a Google Home or use the Google Assistant? Also, the parenting values I thought was nice, and optional to turn it on.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI can't escape it when Google's implementing their AI to call and message other people. They just demonstrated Google's AI calling and trying to converse with unsuspecting users who aren't even notified they're talking to Google.
- anderber 8y agoWhat's the issue/reason you see with Google Assistant calling to make a reservation for a business? Why do you need to avoid it?
- bendecoste 8y agoNot saying I agree with the parent but it's not like Google is going to call it quits here and not try to improve the tech to use in more situations.
- e1ven 8y agoMaybe it'll work out well.. Maybe not. But right now, people being called have an expectation of talking to a person, and this shifts that expectation without the business opting-in to the change. That's going to be frustrating to some businesses, and there may well be legal issues in some areas.
- macrael 8y agoIt's creepy because it's pretending to be people. Phone trees suck, and now a phone tree is calling you and we don't expect phone trees to call us. Now you have to wonder when you get a call wether you are talking to a person or a robot. At the minimum they should announce themselves.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- threatofrain 8y agoThe majority cheers for parental control. Having control over a child's laptop comes as psychologically obvious to most parents.
- reaperducer 8y agoConsider the audience. 20-something and childless, with an underdeveloped sense of right and wrong, which is what has led to so many problems in the tech arena today.
- mFixman 8y agoGet some context, FFS. These are seem close to "dystopian crud" because they are new technology. I'm sure that people seeing a hypothetical AT&T I/O 1980 would think that automated telephone attendants were the end to human communication, commercial internet would ruin good letter writing and therefore society, and fax machines would be used as another form of government control. Imaginary dystopian futures never happen, but people keep imagining new ones.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nikivi 8y agoThe Wavenet assisted new voice got me thinking. I need an Alan Watts voiced Google assistant / Siri.
- mtgx 8y agoLooks like the Google I/O keynote has turned into the Google AI keynote.
- ddalex 8y agoAll your I/O now belong to our AI
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rubicon33 8y agoI closed it after 20 minutes or so. I gotta hope that if I were at the helm of a multi billion dollar company that had been operating efficiently for years, I would take MUCH bigger risks than Google. The projects in this keynote were incredibly boring, and some of them borderline useless. Leave that stuff for smaller companies to tackle, Google. Take on big problems.
- urda 8y agoGoogle doesn't like hard wins anymore, they haven't in a long time. If it isn't easy then it's not worth doing for them. Sometimes even when it is easy, they kill the product off within two years.
- datalist 8y agoStill watching it but I second your sentiment. To be honest after the conferences in the past three, four years I did not have the highest expectations in the first place, but so far that was - again - amazingly underwhelming. As you said, Google should announce game changers and not getting woos for an application that reorients a scanned sheet of paper.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoDisagree. So many just incredible things coming from Google. The internet is a buzz on the Duplex demo but just one thing.
- eitally 8y agoGoogle has gotten leery of talking about the actual moonshots because of the extremely negative press/dialogue that results.
- xedeon 8y agoPersonally, it seems that during the past few years, Google has become so bloated and inefficient that innovation has slowed to a crawl. It's to the point that they are now essentially just like Microsoft during the Steve Ballmer days. They need a visionary leader that can lead and inspire the hundreds of smart people they have. Not to mention the fact how everyone always jokes about how long a product will last after being announced before they kill it off. Their strategy seems to be scattershot, rather than having a sense of direction. I'm curious to see how their internal roadmap looks like.
- gd2 8y agoTheme that I see is branding that besides engineering smarts, Google is likable, thoughtful, someone you'd want as your friend. Leading with the hamburger emoji to move the image of Google as more fun / regular human. and IMHO think its well done.
- TY 8y agoThe call with Chinese restaurant was simply jaw dropping. Sundar says that it was real and I have no grounds not to believe him. This is as close of a demo of technology passing the Turing test as I have ever seen. Sure, it's not a fully free form conversation on any subject, but incredibly impressive nevertheless. Oh yes, and the voice synthesis is just simply amazing. I don't think I'd be able to tell that I was talking to a bot either. So far, it's been the most impressive Google I/O keynote that I've ever seen and it's not over yet.
- fragilistical 8y agoIf you'd like to read up on Google's voice synthesis system do read up on wavenet: https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio... from deepmind.
- VikingCoder 8y agoI missed that. Can someone link to that moment?
- dperfect 8y agohttps://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=1h57m57s https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=1h57m57s
- nfoz 8y agoI'm really trying not to be another "dystopian" commentor, but I can't help but feel sad for the restaurant. The call was awkward. Restaurants are busy. The AI would pause too long and leave her guessing, and respond with the wrong type of emotion (e.g. a dejected sounding "oh, gotcha... thanks..." after she had answered his question with the positive "you can come for four people, ok?". I can't help but think this sort of "corporate lying" (yes it is a lie to robo-call and pretend to be a live human voice) has an external cost of frustration and emotional drainage to be borne by society's ordinary people.
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- chmln 8y ago> The all-new Google News provides you a variety of diverse perspectives on any given topic to help you get the in-depth, balanced picture Proceeds to show stories by: CNN, ABC, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vox, and Politico. Yeah, really diverse perspectives. Its not as if they all hold nearly the same point of view on any issue.
- guiomie 8y agoWhat would you have in there?
- ihsw2 8y agoBuzzFeed and HuffPost are on par with The Daily Wire and Breitbart News -- blatant propaganda ad nauseum.
- chmln 8y agoFor the sake of diversity they could've at least added some token libertarian or conservative outlets. Also contrast the complete lack of neutral (at least relatively), established outlets like Associated Press and Reuters with the presence of...BuzzFeed.
- reaperducer 8y agoIt would be nice if SV realized there are tens of thousands of these things called LOCAL news sources. Every piece of news-related tech we get these days just regurgitates CNN, BBC, etc... How about sending me local content from the local newspapers to start -- you know, things that affect people every day.
- ikeyany 8y agoI get the sense that Google isn't completely sincere with its Digital Wellbeing campaign. Rather than tally up your usage statistics on a dashboard, why not confront the addictive technologies (social media apps, clickbait/sensationalist styles of speaking) head on? Surely they have the data on what addicts people on a deeper level. One example that comes to mind is "Hey, you've used social media X times today. Here are some websites you may like that would increase your attention span."
- mcondit 8y agoThey actually seemed to have touched on something like that briefly, saying they'd come back to it in their android segment. Still not sure if it's sincere but if it is, it's a good set of steps.
- taurath 8y agoWith the google news revamp (to preferring videos to everything, presumably to increase ad revenue) it seems like they want to move the web to more “bad” engagement.
- maherbeg 8y agoThe cynic in me thinks "What a great way to kill eyeballs to your competitors for advertising dollars"
- sunseb 8y agoI love technology. But I don't like what I see anymore. It's scary now. We are heading towards a dystopian future. My smartphone is now a black box in control of my life. I think I will just install a minimal Linux distribution and forget about these big corporations like Google, Apple and so.
- tyrankh 8y ago> I love technology. But I don't like what I see anymore. It's scary now. Welcome to almost every century in human history heh.
- gulperxcx 8y agoWhat brand of tin foil do you use to make your hats? >My smartphone is now a black box in control of my life. Only if you let it control your life.
- kshatrea 8y agoI am not sure what all this is supposed to enable us as customers or users to do. What I can see is a bunch of ways to avoid human contact including no longer calling people like a real human or not even choosing my own words in an email. But from the perspective of someone who dealt with Google's awful customer service, maybe they could use this in that regard to actually have a voice on the phone even if it isn't human. Automation is a great thing until you see the human cost. At some point Google is going to have to use its vast capacities to not give people more time, instead give them more opportunities. For e.g. the DeepMind paper showing how to save energy - that was cool.
- tyrankh 8y ago> What I can see is a bunch of ways to avoid human contact including no longer calling people like a real human or not even choosing my own words in an email. Auto-complete is hardly "avoiding human contact", is it? Regardless, these features are all optional - if you feel as though you're avoiding human interaction by using auto-complete, why not just... not use it?
- reaperducer 8y ago>Auto-complete is hardly "avoiding human contact", is it? It is. It removes the color and nuance from typed communication. There's a lot of metadata in typos.
- tyrankh 8y ago> It is. It removes the color and nuance from typed communication. There's a lot of metadata in typos. Oh puh-lease. Are you seriously trying to argue that TYPOS are the anchor upon which genuine human interaction hinges on? I mean, wow. If you're trolling that's amazing.
- jakebasile 8y agoYou conveyed more emotional information in the misspelled "puh-lease" than you would've with the correctly spelled "please".
- djrogers 8y ago> This video is restricted. Try signing in with a Google Apps account. Ughh.. I really hate this - why does Google put videos like this behind sign-in walls? Now I gotta go find my g-apps sign-in info, and rmember to purge it from my browser when I'm done again. GRRRR
- magicalist 8y agoIt opens in incognito/private browsing for me just fine
- djrogers 8y agoSerious question here - legally, what's the difference between a google-bot calling my place of business and a robocall, which is illegal in the US and California?
- killjoywashere 8y agoAgency and the intent of the beneficiary strike me as relevant issues. However, one can readily imagine someone using a system like this to hold hostage the schedules of many, many service businesses. Think OpenTable with no intervening agreement between the restraunt and the intermediary.
- lsb 8y agoThe google-bot calling your place of business is tantamount to someone's butler calling your place of business. Often time, people prefer talking to professional appointment-bookers. Sometimes, not. When HR departments are recruiting, they avoid talking to agencies, with language like "principals only".
- nfoz 8y agoAh, so I suppose there are two dimensions: 1) The caller has a business-reason for initiating the call; if the receiver doesn't want that sort of call, it's a problem (spam calls). 2) The caller is a robot, and the receiver might not want to accept calls from robots, and now they might not even know it's a robot with which to have an informed opinion. I wonder which one the robo-call laws are trying to cover, if not both. Google's certainly doing both, what's new is that the receiver is being misled about (2) and possibly even (1).
- dragonwriter 8y agoWhat is illegal, IIRC, is a pre-recorded call, outside of certain prescribed bounds. Duplex calls do not appear to be pre-recorded. It's unclear whether those regulating pre-recorded calls would have treated interactive automated transactional calls the same had they anticipated them, so I don't think it makes sense to blindly treat them as equivalent without new legislation. Whether they should, on the merits, be regulated, and if so whether with the same or a different model, is perhaps an interesting debate.
- pjmlp 8y agoI can hardly believe that people cannot control themselves to the point that adding features to disable the mobile use is a sell point.
- slow_donkey 8y agoIf you're referring to 'Shush' I'm excited for that purely for convenience sake. I see a lot of my friends use that same action (flipping phone over on table) when we're holding a conversation/eating/etc.
- pjmlp 8y agoI just put it on silence and leave it on the pocket.
- sidcool 8y agoNo new hardware this year? The rest was quite impressive.
- mrep 8y agoI cannot seem to find the time but they did announce a new TPU and it is now even liquid cooled. Edit: here is an article on it and they are apparently 8x more powerful than the previous generation: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/08/google-launches-tpu-3-point-0-third-version-of-ai-chips.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/08/google-launches-tpu-3-point-...
- sidcool 8y agoI meant consumer electronics hardware, new pixels or chromebooks etc. But that's for a separate event, apparently.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoAt IO Extended Waterloo. They said they tend to reserve the hardware launches for the fall, and gravitate toward software launches in the spring when asked the same question
- vthallam 8y agoGoogle is winning with TPU's. Most other competitors even with great machine learning talent would not be able to match the speed that Google does things with because of the TPU's.
- raverbashing 8y agoAnd optimized sw for those TPUs
- markdog12 8y agoStream was using AV1 codec for me, on both Chrome and FF nightly. Unfortunately quality was terrible, for whatever reason
- arijun 8y agothe actual keynote starts at 1:20:17. Can someone get the direct link for people coming later? I can't seem to do it on mobile. And can we perhaps change the link in the post?
- Jaepa 8y agoThis has to my favorite part: https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=2536 https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=2536
- btutal 8y agoI wanted to download it to watch it offline during long bus trip but none of the downloaders seem to be working for previously live streamed videos on YouTube. Any other working method?