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

• amelius 8y ago
  I would have preferred it if this technology was developed at a university. It seems that the academic world is being replaced by the corporate world at a worrisome pace.
• minimaxir 8y ago
  > The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversations using these disfluencies sound more familiar and natural. This part stuck out to me during the Google I/O demo, as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.
  • luckydata 8y ago
    It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.
    • cletus 8y ago
      This is a pretty common pattern. Lots of websites also have "establishing secure connection" interstitials for the same reason.
      • mrep 8y ago
        Yep, and the 10 second "deal" compilations for travel packages really happen in a fraction of a second. They just purposefully delay the results to make it seem like they are doing a lot of processing in finding all the possible deals and showing you the best ones.
      • Moto7451 8y ago
        Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.
        • gowld 8y ago
          That's the opposite of what parent and other commenters are saying. Users prefer the loading animations, according to the growth hackers.
          • freehunter 8y ago
            I think they were agreeing. "Test out of" seems to be another way of saying "we tried getting rid of the spinners but people didn't like it"?
          • deleted 8y ago
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      • jdietrich 8y ago
        It can be a more friendly way of rate-limiting expensive DB queries. An interstitial that says "too many queries, try again in 10 seconds" is far more annoying than a loading bar.
    • gowld 8y ago
      That famous tax preparation software added several screens to "review" the data.
    • jdietrich 8y ago
      It's really just an audio version of a loading bar or spinner - users get really uncomfortable if the UI becomes unresponsive for even a few hundred milliseconds, but they'll wait for several seconds if it looks like something is happening. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise
      • gowld 8y ago
        People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.
        • jdietrich 8y ago
          OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing. Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays. Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress; in most cases, this could be greatly improved with a bit of educated guesswork. A completely fictitious progress bar can be extremely credible, because it's totally predictable - if you need to create a 10 second delay, then it's easy to make the bar progress linearly from 0% to 100% in that time. Users learn very quickly that your progress bar tells the truth about how long they'll be waiting, even though it's lying about the reason for the wait.
          • thaumasiotes 8y ago
            > Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress I disagree with this; I find the progress bars more credible with erratic timing. (And ideally, a display of the task currently at hand, like "Copying tiny file. Copying tiny file. Copying giant file............") A progress bar that smoothly fills from 0 to 100 looks like an animation that somebody thought it would make you happy to watch. A progress bar that lags at 7% and then rushes the rest of the way looks like the software has some internal metric for task completion, and is reporting according to that metric. This implies that when the number changes, progress has happened, which isn't the case for a progress bar that isn't affected by workload. The software can't use "how much time has elapsed?" as a progress metric, because it doesn't know how much time things will take, and because the passage of time does not actually cause -- or reflect -- any progress. That progress bar would be a spinner, not a progress bar.
    • airstrike 8y ago
      I've heard the HP12c calculator also slows down its screen refresh on purpose because people couldn't believe the math was right when it first came out and it was blazing fast.
    • piyush_soni 8y ago
      Most of the flight search companies do the same ("Finding the best/cheapest flights for you"). It's almost instantaneous, but they introduce this artificial wait.
      • spuz 8y ago
        That seems unlikey. Flight search really does take a long time because they need to make API calls to external services for most customer requests and they need to refresh prices roughly hourly and so cannot rely on cached data. Also, even the best flight search websites are frustratingly slow. If that delay was created intentionally then they already lost me as a customer as a result.
        • piyush_soni 8y ago
          I can't seem to find that post right now, but a person (on Quora/reddit I guess) who worked in the development team of a flight search company told this fact.
  • saulrh 8y ago
    I don't know if I'd call it a "deficiency" - if we interpret "disfluency" in a literal sense as "not flowing" without negative connotation, then the interruptions (hmm, uh, okay) are actually communicating useful information to the other party. I might even say that omitting those interruptions (and replacing them with, say, dead silence) might be poor communication.
    • gowld 8y ago
      The "um" isn't a deficiency, but the slow response is. If the response is artificially delayed to give the appearance of slow thinking, and an "um" added to fill the artificially long silence, that's an artificial deficiency.
      • cryptoz 8y ago
        It's not a deficiency if understanding is increased. If that fake pause increases the listener's understanding of the sentence (it might), then the 'slow response' is not a deficiency but an improvement. Edit: should the robot talk at 2x normal speaking speed in order to more quickly convey the necessary information? Slowing the speech down artificially so a human could easily understand it sounds like a deficiency to me. (By your definition).
      • adrianmonk 8y ago
        I interpreted it differently. It isn't to give the appearance of slow thinking. It is to wait for the other person to be ready to accept the answer. When talking to real humans, I've encountered people who don't do this, and I find it makes communication difficult and frustrating. I'm not 100% sure why I need this pause, but I know I need it. Maybe I'm considering whether my question made sense or needs corrections/additions, so that I can't focus on the answer yet. Or maybe it takes time to switch the brain from "speaking mode" to "listening mode". At any rate, when people do this, I have to ask them to repeat the first few words they said because I didn't catch them. And the reason I didn't catch them wasn't mumbling or background noise or anything. Well-formed sounds made it to my ear just fine, but my brain wasn't ready to accept them for a fraction of a second.
  • jfaucett 8y ago
    > as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision. well, in semantics/pragmatics these discourse particles are often not deficiencies at all. They are signals with practical semantic purpose. "hmms" and "uhs" can signal attentiveness, turn-taking (turn holding, turn yielding, etc), agreement - just to name a few. For any machine system to be able to pass as human, it will have to be able to control these nuances or people will pick up on something being wrong, though they might not be able to articulate precisely what.
    • ghayes 8y ago
      I really enjoyed the machine's "uhs" and "uhms" in the demo speech. However, I felt the "uh-huh"s sounded forced. It's funny how these subtleties are very important in human conversation.
      • 2bitencryption 8y ago
        I think probably because "uh-huh" can have many different meanings based on inflection! As a "non-word", it relies heavily on how it is conveyed. Imagine someone asks you a question, I bet you can answer using just the word "uh-huh" but conveying these different emotions: rude, perky, bored, upset, annoyed, dubious, excited and probably a dozen more. Even using the "perky" or "happy" one in a situation where it isn't warranted might sound rude or unthoughtful!
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • jonbarker 8y ago
    Ums and other filler words are not as bad as they are made out to be among the public speaking crowd: https://www.eab.com/daily-briefing/2016/07/29/um-filler-words-may-not-always-be-bad-and-may-do-some-good https://www.eab.com/daily-briefing/2016/07/29/um-filler-word...
  • paulkon 8y ago
    People are more willing get on board with bots acting like people than the other way around. The speech disfluencies used by Duplex in the salon and restaurant interactions are perfect examples of why natural speech sounds natural. It's the cadence as well as the timing.
  • pg_bot 8y ago
    If you are building a system that mimics human speech you need to teach it to be imperfect and use common parlance. Otherwise you will fall into the uncanny valley. If you listen to the conversation again there are several points where they lose immersion. For example no one would say 12 pm, they would say 'noon' instead. Google has clearly done some impressive work here, and I'm now a bit more confident/scared that they will be able to successfully fool me in the next few years.
    • shashanoid 8y ago
      Your argument about calling it "noon" instead of "PM" is just illogical. I'd always use PM instead of noon -- whenever I'm trying to be specific about something (appointments and such). I understand the argument you're trying to make but that wasn't enough.
      • jstanley 8y ago
        How is "PM" more specific than "noon"? Absent the context of this conversation, it's not immediately obvious to me whether 12 PM is midday or midnight, where as "noon" is unambiguous.
        • macintux 8y ago
          I think historically "noon" expresses less precision, although I suspect that's less true now that everyone always knows what time it is and has GPS in their pocket to help calculate arrival times. 20 years ago, had I said to someone "I'll be there at 12pm" it would have had a stronger implication of precision than "I'll be there at noon." I don't think it's true today.
          • jstanley 8y ago
            Understood. So the difference is you interpret "noon" as an ill-defined probability distribution centred roughly around midday, rather than a concrete point in time, whereas you interpret "12PM" as a concrete point in time. Fair enough.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • andrei_says_ 8y ago
    Google maps has the most pleasant and human sounding voice approach I’ve encountered in any such system. All other gps guidance voices sound incredibly crude and mechanical in comparison.
    • fudged71 8y ago
      In my city I can recognize that google has two different 'voices' or voice libraries. They sound slightly different. I'm curious how that works and why it's not all done with one.
      • joeyo 8y ago
        I've noticed this as well. My working hypothesis is that one is for high(er) bandwidth and the other for low bandwidth situations.
        • gusmd 8y ago
          My understanding is that the "low-fi", more robotic one uses an offline TTS engine for when there is no connectivity. When connectivity is good, it will switch to better, cloud-based one.
    • goshx 8y ago
      The Brazilian Portuguese voice is not that great.
  • dsjoerg 8y ago
    Similar to how when designing a virtual face, it looks more natural if it has some slight asymmetries and "defects", and when designing a synthetic drumbeat, if it's "perfect" it sounds totally robotic. Imperfection is natural and comfortable. Perfect corners and edges are artificial and weird to the distracting point.
  • TomV1971 8y ago
    Reminds me of comfort noise in the telephone system. Even though the system encodes silences noise free (so improve compression), it deliberately inserts noise because otherwise people think the line is dead.
  • L_226 8y ago
    Similar to lens flares in (first person) video games.
• jld 8y ago
  In the case where the person on the other end isn't a native english speaker, (the calling a restaurant clip) why doesn't Google figure out what language they speak and speak it to them?
  • thawab 8y ago
    Currently I'm working on a similar project. Building a GAN (generative adversarial network) for voice is a lot of work and testing, you need a big dataset for labeled voices. Wavenet currently support English[0]. Also you need a neural NLP model for this language. [0]https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices
  • madeofpalk 8y ago
    I would imagine that a lot of the work that goes into making the speaking so natural would be very specific to English. As in, they would need to repeat 50% of the work for each language.
  • jacquesm 8y ago
    Do Scots count as native English speakers? What about the Irish? English has a very large number of accents and dialects that all count as 'English', but typically speech recognition software only works one variety.
    • crispyporkbites 8y ago
      Scots are definitely native english speakers, reluctant ones at that, but english nonetheless
      • wilsonnb 8y ago
        I think the person you are responding to might have been talking about those who speak the language Scots, not just Scottish people. Many consider Scots to be an actual language separate from English. There's a good amount of debate about this among linguists, I think. For anyone curious, I recommend reading these pages from the recent Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book to get a feel for how it differs from English. https://imgur.com/gallery/wjkDp#gSO4FRW https://imgur.com/gallery/wjkDp#gSO4FRW
• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Never have we had a more clear example of why Google needs to be regulated, and laws against what they're doing needs to be passed. The fact that they think it's okay to have bots pretending to be human making phone calls, shortly after demonstrating how quickly they can copy someone's voice (re: John Legend), it shows a blatant disregard for what they're creating.
  • politician 8y ago
    At the very least, there should be an requirement to identify when challenged. "Are you a bot?" "Yes, I am Google Duplex v1.2. This call is being recorded; you can see our privacy policy and terms of service at http://google.com/duplex." http://google.com/duplex."
    • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      I agree, but the social pressure not to use it would be immense. Imagine the awkward moments where we start confronting people who call us and asking them if they're real.
      • rayiner 8y ago
        It's already happening. I'm getting robo calls from some police donation fund that will slow down and restart speaking if you interrupt them (took me a few moments to realize it was a recording).
        • toomuchtodo 8y ago
          Charities and political organizations are excluded unfortunately from robocall regulation. Google, though, is not. If I were to start receiving Duplex calls, and could detect it, I would report each one to the FTC.
      • Paul-ish 8y ago
        Perhaps they should identify themselves upfront? "Hello, this is an automated call on behalf of..."
• arikr 8y ago
  This is amazing! I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards with the same/fewer input resources. In short, technology is a wonderful thing that allows very low marginal costs. This is what we need to make the future a better place, given a consistent or growing population. "Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less." This is a perfect demonstration of that. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ "A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place – Egoistic Altruism"
  • ansible 8y ago
    > I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards. That's been the dream for a long time in some circles. With the enormous productivity gains and ability to leverage external energy sources (fossil fuels, solar, etc.) we could have built a society of wealth and leisure for all. Maybe we will still. The hope is that if there is enough of a productivity gain in a short enough time period (like the introduction of AGI powered robots) that this could still happen.
    • sp527 8y ago
      The technology promises "wealth and leisure for all". The capital owners promise "it'll trickle down". Technical utopianists need to start tempering their optimism with the realities of human nature and design systems accordingly.
      • ansible 8y ago
        I think our only realistic hope is actually various non-profit foundations and such. When you think about it, I can download (for zero cost), a high-quality operating system and attendant applications which would have cost hundreds of dollars 20 years ago, and would have cost a fortune 40 years ago. Ditto for educational materials, entertainment, etc. In that sense, we are quite wealthy in comparison to previous generations. If charitable organizations can leverage the automation of the future to help people, we might then see all humans across the planet lifted out of poverty. But yeah, I don't expect corporations to do this. And it seems unlikely that most governments will either.
• option_greek 8y ago
  Wish they can provide the integrated package as an API.
• whatever_dude 8y ago
  Can't decide whether this is amazing or scary.
  • sumoboy 8y ago
    moving prank calls to a new level
  • politician 8y ago
    Just wait until a Google Duplex caller "on behalf of a client" calls to schedule a reservation at a restaurant using Google Duplex to answer the phones.
    • detaro 8y ago
      I wonder if they detect that and solve whatever task it is directly then.
      • politician 8y ago
        It'd be trivial to detect if they transmit high-frequency noise over the line, and then fallback to DTMF tones.
        • lifeformed 8y ago
          That'd be a creepy conversation to listen in on. "Ah yes, I see you are a robot too." Proceeds to transmit data through dial-up-esque noise
        • rtkwe 8y ago
          Since the restaurant in this situation is clearly using a digital booking system already why would Google (or whatever service inherits this kind of bot call) not just check on the popular booking sites before placing the call?
    • jonknee 8y ago
      The most inefficient API you could design!
• 542458 8y ago
  This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!
  • apendleton 8y ago
    At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling it.
    • menzoic 8y ago
      I don't think the scaling concern should be underestimated. Thats a big difference. Its mostly a numbers game.
      • throwawayjava 8y ago
        It's not just scaling, but also speed. If you sequentially attack a subpopulation (e.g., employees at a company, senior citizens) the eventually news about your attack will spread throughout that network (internal security alert, evening news+daily newspapers+AARP+...). If you attack the entire subpopulation in rapid succession over the course of days or even hours, educational countermeasures become much less effective.
    • jbob2000 8y ago
      So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home. Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and you see where this is going.
• shozab 8y ago
  https://thatssoft.com/crazytalk-animator/ https://thatssoft.com/crazytalk-animator/
• have_faith 8y ago
  One positive thing about our dystopian future is that it will force us to meet up more in person, if only to confirm our friends are real.
  • JeffreyKaine 8y ago
    If you can't tell if your AI friend is real, are they not a real friend? They might not be human, but they will still be your friend, no?
    • graeme 8y ago
      I think they meant: are you really talking to your friend the human, and not a bot impersonating that friend.
  • politician 8y ago
    It's already happening, most people I know rarely, if ever, answer calls from unknown phone numbers.
  • madeofpalk 8y ago
    But then you would need to shoot them to see if they bleed or not.
    • option_greek 8y ago
      And claw at your own eyes to make sure you are not in a VR :)
  • trophycase 8y ago
    Nah because with everyone using AR, Google Glass, and Snapchat spectacles, we won't even be able to trust what we're seeing isn't manipulated.
• blklivesmatter 8y ago
  Real world privacy stealing in realtime. Who want google to spy in they life ?
• kingnothing 8y ago
  Google home's speech recognition can't even reliably turn my lights on and off every time, why would I trust it to book a restaurant reservation? I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.
  • strictnein 8y ago
    Listen to the audio examples. The person at the restaurant misheard the bot and repeated incorrect information back to it and it handled it in stride.
    • SilasX 8y ago
      I just hope it never gets one of the 9 out of 10 humans who don't repeat back important information to prevent miscommunication...
      • strictnein 8y ago
        How would the bot fair worse than a normal human in that situation?
      • davidcbc 8y ago
        How does that differ from a human having the same conversation? If I call a restaurant and say "Can I have a reservation for 6 at 8:00" and they write down a reservation for 8 at 6:00 without repeating it back I won't know until I show up at 8:00 with my 5 friends.
        • SilasX 8y ago
          True -- I was mainly snarking about people with poor communication practices, not the technology (which seems great -- a godsend for people like me who hate phone communication).
      • jonas21 8y ago
        Those humans won't be taking reservations for long, even from other humans, if they don't learn to repeat back the important information.
• chrisabrams 8y ago
  There are plenty of places in my town that don't have online ordering or booking...this would (potentially) help with that...but really, I'd rather there be more tech be built around enabling theses companies to "be online" such as an online ordering or booking system. When I find a hair cut place, why can't I just book an appointment right from the Google Maps search? I'd rather have that type of convenience instead. Ironically they may add that at some point, and Duplex just calls on my behalf without me even knowing.
  • sarreph 8y ago
    > Ironically they may add that at some point, and Duplex just calls on my behalf without me even knowing. Yup, good observation; seems highly likely, save for the 'without even knowing' bit... I would imagine you'd 'request to book' and an async Duplex operation would run in the background and send you a notification of the outcome / possibilities.
  • sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    I can imagine this being an extension to robots.txt - i.e. do I mind my business being robo-called, or would I rather send an API call to <x>. This is an interesting point in AI technology.
• jeremiahwv 8y ago
  And then the salon and the restaurant start using Duplex as well, and all phone conversations become Google talking to Google. How bout: "Hey Duplex, call this support number and get a top level human manager on the line please." Then we get a HN article: "Duplex is fighting Alexa!"
  • themacguffinman 8y ago
    Duplex vs Alexa rap battle!
  • andrei_says_ 8y ago
    I wonder who’s have the last laugh on this.
  • drexlspivey 8y ago
    Google voice API, like a real API but much slower.
  • ProblemFactory 8y ago
    > And then the salon and the restaurant start using Duplex as well, and all phone conversations become Google talking to Google. This must be the most convoluted API protocol ever invented.
• mattnewport 8y ago
  The examples they give are quite impressive but I always want to hear some examples of failures as well with these types of technology. They mention that the system is self monitoring and will try to detect a situation it can't handle and redirect to a human operator but I think some examples of situations it can't handle or where it gets things wrong would be very useful in understanding its real world robustness.
• piyh 8y ago
  Stuff like this makes me excited for the world my kids will live in.
• tanilama 8y ago
  This is awesome, But The algorithm of cause doesn't understand all contexts. What troubles me is that, in the first example, should we really give algorithm the freedom to propose a new date for an appointment? It reminds me one thing that particular bothers me with the Gmail's smart reply feature, where when given Monday or Wednesday as options, the suggested reply is, 'How about Tuesday', which does make the conversation flows, but doesn't really make any logical sense. It makes a good demo, I am very much impressed, however, I feel it will run into a LOT of issues, even only in those provided scenarios, should those scenarios become more sophisticated.
  • Denvercoder9 8y ago
    I'd expect you to be able to give Duplex the range of dates and times where you're available (or let it get the info from your Google Calendar).
    • BinaryIdiot 8y ago
      Exactly this. I put together a rough demo of similar AI scheduling in the past and x.ai does this as well. The AI works within a given constraint before proposing new times because the idea is to free up time for you, not make you clean up a scheduling mistake every time something is decided by the AI.
  • space_fountain 8y ago
    Ideally this would have to have access to your calendar or be given a time range of options.
• sunseb 8y ago
  Voight-Kampff test : PASS.
• silverlake 8y ago
  I want to use this to fight spam calls.
  • cpeterso 8y ago
    People have already had good success engaging telemarketers with much more primitive robots. Here are some funny samples on YouTube: Lenny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgT44DuIaAM&list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nOGWrXlhl-i_3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgT44DuIaAM&list=PLduL71_GKz... Jolly Roger: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm-hnvBm9Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm-hnvBm9Q
• carlsborg 8y ago
  Can someone from the research community comment on how this compares to the state of the art in open research?
  • killjoywashere 8y ago
    Neural networks are a fundamentally statistical technique, so you find the state of the art whereever you find the largest scale. No one is operating at larger scale than Google, which has the second order effect of attracting the best talent, which then gets sorted to the highest priority problems. There are a non-trivial number of instances where Google will beat their own state of the art, and I'm quite confident they are sitting on further results to avoid a public embaressment of riches.
• leahcim 8y ago
  Crazy! Looks similar to Upcall.com where they have real people calling for you.
• fixermark 8y ago
  At last, putting the power of annoying robot phone trees in the hands of the consumer, to be directed at businesses. For that reason alone, I'm excited. ;) (Note: In fairness, the conversation demos are actually really slick and much better than a phone tree. I'll be interested to see how well it works in practice.)
• cosmic_ape 8y ago
  They have listed the problems with such systems in the first paragraph. They claim to overcome these by restricting to very specific domains. But specific domains are usually still wide. A table for two, but in the garden or inside? Inside on which floor? Sometimes it doesn't matter, sometimes it does, and these things are specific and different for every business. Really skeptical about this. And if this does become a thing, it will dumb down the interaction.
  • sushirain 8y ago
    The bot can gather this restaurant specific information over several conversations with the restaurant. This wasn't possible before. This domain isn't too wide.
    • cosmic_ape 8y ago
      You are probably right that in principle one could eventually come up with a full catalog of features of a reservation. There would be about, say, 100 of those. I seriously doubt that they will proceed to define and collect them, since those are probably 10% or less of all reservations, but lets say they would. Then still, the conversation you make to make the reservation is a process in which you make the decision. Say, there is a place inside at 20:00 or a place in the garden at 20:30. Are you going to let Google choose between the two options for you? Do you imagine there would be an api in which you specify to the assistant, before it makes a call, your preferences in that much granularity?
• adwi 8y ago
  Is any product remotely as close to this with natural-sounding human speech? Are we entering an era where all voice assistants are getting to that "Her" level in terms of human-like vocal quality? That part is as impressive to me as the semantic parsing it's doing on that call.
  • fudged71 8y ago
    Not that I've seen. The most advanced IVR systems that some banks are using have voice fingerprints and recognition etc but the TTS is still noticeably robotic. Other companies are using huge libraries of recorded human voice for communications and concatenating them together in intelligent ways.
• deleted 8y ago
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• sgslo 8y ago
  This is one end-game of AI - changing the economics of scams. Imagine how a 'long con' works today: a scammer befriends a person online through a video game or social platform, and develops a rapport with them over the span of days, weeks, months. After some trust has been gained, the scammer then requests money from the victim. Does this happen a lot today? I don't know, but certainly one reason it doesn't is the economics of the scam. Who wants to spend a significant period of time gaining trust just for the chance of a payout? AI is going to flip this on its head. Rather than dedicating hundreds of hours of a scammers time, a scammer could instead use a system like Duplex to befriend hundreds or thousands of victims simultaneously. Let it run for a few months, developing a strong rapport with the target, until the AI finally requests some money from the victim. Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"?
  • mrtksn 8y ago
    Well, I'm already receiving automated calls about "that car accident" and they connect me to a real person if I happen to respond with a predefined keyword. I would say that there's a market for that. How long before rough agents implement good AI for their operations? How long before we implement defences against AI?
  • jokh 8y ago
    > Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"? The former (booking a table) is much more "constrained", as in the conversation would most likely not go into much of a tangent, because there are only so many responses to a statement like "book a table for four at 8pm" (8pm is full, 8pm works, etc). Whereas asking someone how their day was would give the "victim" a much bigger breadth of responses (and additional questions!) that would cause the AI to stumble and fail to give a satisfactory answer. That, and running this 1,000 times simultaneously so that no one person would be able to intervene to "help" the AI would just be a highly unscalable operation. So yes, huge difference.
    • 8y ago
• imnotadoctor999 8y ago
  This is truly amazing work! Congrats Google for achieving this :)
• stingrae 8y ago
  I worry that this will make people have an AI make phone calls for them regularly when they wouldn't have in the past. At some point, the restaurants will need to have their own AI to respond to the call volume. You end up with 2 AIs attempting to have a conversation.
  • andrei_says_ 8y ago
    Give your credit card number to one of them and it will be even more fun.
  • ovao 8y ago
    If the main impediment to dining at a restaurant was having to reserve a table, I think that would be a real possibility. But the main impediments are usually cost, complexity in getting to the restaurant, unfamiliarity with how good the food and service are, agreeing with the rest of the party about the timing, etc.. The actual booking of a table is a minor stepping stone on the road from the thought to the actual execution of the plan.
• cromwellian 8y ago
  The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is. People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases. In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot following a repetitive script. Duplex seems trained against this corpus. The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex. Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls, so I think the reverse of this duplex system, a more natural voice booking system for small businesses would help the immensely free up their workers to focus on customers.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • Florin_Andrei 8y ago
    > The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is. Right, and this kind of comments will continue for a while. The question is - when the "this is trivial, move on" type of comments will start to fade out? Five years? Ten?
  • empath75 8y ago
    I love how no matter how amazing something is, someone will eventually say it's trivial, even though it's taken the smartest people on earth decades to figure out how to do this. >The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex. The end game is clearly to use an api, not this.
    • badprose 8y ago
      The benefit is that a human could jump in and take over either side of the conversation. Anyone can have a conversation, but not everyone can author an API.
• fsloth 8y ago
  So... theoretically I could operate an AI call center that would serve most languages? Well, as a first measure, anyway.
• narrator 8y ago
  Avi Ovadya among others has talked about a coming infopocalypse in which fake anything can be generated. Combined with data troves from Facebook or wherever they can simulate actual people to completely steal identities on a large scale and create a society disrupting mass hysteria to start a war or a mass panic. IMHO, to fix this everything needs two factor authentication generated by a biometric scan in person at a government office. Yes you could use a blockchain for it too.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    Agreed through the identifier bit. But the first part, yes.
• isthispermanent 8y ago
  I did a whole write up about my homegrown attempt to do this last summer. That blog post from Google is more technical but eerily similar. https://philandrews.io/post/20000-phone-calls-later-why-siri-cant-make-your-dentist-appointment https://philandrews.io/post/20000-phone-calls-later-why-siri... In short, I don't have a lot of faith in this being plausible yet. The major reason is the phone lines. Phone call quality is not solid enough to ensure a accuracy rate high enough to roll this out as a production service. There are others, like legal considerations, but if I had to pick one that would be it. There's a reason why this rose to number one HN, people would clamor for it. To think that Apple and Google haven't been thinking the same thing is short sited.
  • zerostar07 8y ago
    It was the most impressive thing in the keynote for sure, but given the current state of AI we should have no reason to believe that this would work well enough to be employed at scale. It also feels weird that it is trying to trick the callee that it is a human. I believe even if they used a mechanical voice, the system could work, because businesses would learn to recognize the "google call" and respond to it the way they respond to any voice-enabled call center. It seems to me it is more of an (impressive) PR thing than something that will get actual use.
    • isthispermanent 8y ago
      I agree. There's a whole world where I imagine businesses with stickers like the Visa accepted here stickers, except something like "Siri accepted here" or "Siri works here", whatever the wording. That way you would know that you could use Siri to interact with that business on your behalf. That takes away part of the resistance to phone bots by people that answer phones, them expecting those calls.
• eddieplan9 8y ago
  The demos look as exciting as any chatbot demos we saw before, and I think it will fail in practice just like how chatbots fail. With the exception of very few verticals in controlled settings, most real world tasks are way more dynamic and fluid than what we can comfortable code in some state machine. The article pointed it out, too > One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations. The question is after you limit it to "closed domains" narrow enough, where it can still be practically useful. It might help with certain functions in enterprise settings. It will definitely work for spammers because they can work with even 1% success rate.
• spdustin 8y ago
  > [...] we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data. That's alarming, and thinly cloaked in euphemism (IMO). "Conversation data" here means recordings of actual human-to-human calls, as well as their automated transcriptions. Both were used. Where did that source audio come from?
  • chime 8y ago
    For years, Google had a 1-800 free 411 service. Even a decade ago it was expected that they would use that data for AI.
• noetic_techy 8y ago
  I think every telemarketer just lost their job.
• danso 8y ago
  I wonder how this will work in situations in which botting for reservations has been frowned upon, e.g. the restaurant world's version of high-frequency trading: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/how-robots-are-stealing-your-dinner-reservations?utm_term=.ka58aN4roe#.su1OobmRKx https://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/how-robots-are-stealing-y...
• mithr 8y ago
  This is amazing, but one thing I don't really understand is this: earlier in the presentation, they demoed some new Google Assistant voices. All of them sound like standard computer-synthesized assistants. On the other hand, the synthesized Duplex voices sound indistinguishable from human speech to me, even without the "disfluencies" they include. If Google has gotten speech synthesis to this point, why isn't Assistant synthesizing speech of this quality?
  • Klathmon 8y ago
    I have a feeling it's because this is such a limited domain. During the demo it all sounded very realistic, except for some parts like the times. It would flow naturally then all of a sudden pause awkwardly and then say a time like "12 pm" in a weird way. I have a feeling they are getting it to sound so realistic because there's a fairly small amount of responses and questions it needs to work with, so they can either pre-record real humans, or heavily tune a ML voice to sound as natural as possible.
    • ksk 8y ago
      Hmm, or maybe its because you can run the synthesis on a much powerful computer? Certainly very impressive..
      • hjnilsson 8y ago
        It's possible all the questions are even prerecorded human voices. The corpus is probably less than a 1000 phrases.
  • DecayingOrganic 8y ago
    This is simply because Google Duplex's TTS engine is using Tacotron and WaveNet which are not ready for general use yet.
    • halflings 8y ago
      WaveNet is already used in the Assistant and Google Translate at least. The new voices they announced are powered by WaveNet.
• monkeynotes 8y ago
  All this is great, and I am sure Google will use the tech responsibly, but I feel we are rapidly approaching a point where humans can no longer use their senses to discern critical truths about our own reality. I honestly don't know how that's going to pan out. Just imagining it already makes me feel the kind of paranoia creep you get when you are too high.
  • gausha 8y ago
    That's true. People do not take psychological effects of technology seriously. The reason being most of us are already addicts. Who knows if this comment is by a bot or a real person.
• Pfhreak 8y ago
  A few observations: * In the example where Google asked about holiday hours -- they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info. Interesting thought experiment is Google validating their reviews/business listings by actually calling businesses and speaking to a real human. * This is going to be fantastic for accessibility. Maybe I struggle to speak, and I want a reservation. I can have the machine do the irritating work, and focus on just having a nice meal or getting a service (like a haircut). * Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose.
  • Paul-ish 8y ago
    > Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose. This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. This time commitment asymmetry will be the issue with these systems. Like email spam, it becomes much easier to waste others people's time when you automate time wasting. If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.
    • Klathmon 8y ago
      >This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. They pointed out during the presentation that the system could call once to a business and get the hours, then allow hundreds or thousands of users to see that without bothering the business again. Assuming it works, it could save a significant amount of time for some places. >If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant. Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them. If they allow something like the parent commenter pointed out, they would sour relationships with businesses who would promptly seek out ways to block or decline calls from this system.
• carapace 8y ago
  Is there going to be a way for businesses (any and all receivers really) to opt-out of receiving these calls? Could it be opt-in on the receiver-side?
• scoofy 8y ago
  I hang up on robocalls now... I guarantee this service is going to get hung up on more than it will work. People don't like getting treated like crap at home, why do we need to treat them like crap at work.
  • wan23 8y ago
    There's a difference between a spam robocall to your personal number and a robot calling a business line to inquire about legitimate business. I imagine if my job were answering phones I'd much prefer talking to a robot that speaks clear English over actual people who could have difficult accents or who might just be rude on the phone.
  • anchpop 8y ago
    If you were getting robocalls from people wanting to buy your product would you hang up?
• fudged71 8y ago
  If the line is busy I assume they call back as well? That's another time saver for the consumer. And it's a great spin on the Future of Work. It's offloading the time from the consumer onto paid workers at the businesses.
• mrfusion 8y ago
  This would be so awesome for getting prices. Imagine having it call the closest twenty mechanics and getting prices for new brakes!
• cerealbad 8y ago
  let's see if this works future google find and quote this comment back to me when i am 85 _use a heavy 17th century ural peasant accent, slurring voice to imitate heavy drinking, then proceed to sing me a song about your lost love, don't read the edited part_
• drexlspivey 8y ago
  Can't wait to get a million duplex calls a day about "the car accident"
• mrfusion 8y ago
  It’s funny to me that most places where you can make any kind of appointment online usually have a captcha. I wonder if they’ll start having a verbal captcha on phone calls.
  • lucio 8y ago
    great comment. Imagine the person on the other line saying... what? what verbal captcha a system like this could not answer? What do you feel if I step on your foot? Do roses smell good? Even if the name is not "rose"? What's the color of melancholy?
• JepZ 8y ago
  Interesting, many people here seem to be fascinated by this and I am sitting here thinking: Oh my good, I hope I will never have to work on a phone receiving such calls. The technology is kinda cool, but when I think about the poor sound quality of some calls and my experience with voice assistants, I wonder in how many cases this will end in just garbage appointments or very poor experiences for the human on the one side of the phone. Besides that, I like how Google is pushing to change the current way of making appointments. Maybe this will drive more small/medium businesses to use online services for appointments.
  • modeless 8y ago
    Talking with humans is often a poor experience too. I can imagine employees of small businesses preferring to talk to Google rather than customers directly, as unlike real customers Google should be predictable, and never frustrated or angry.
    • jmagoon 8y ago
      That's almost worse. Can you imagine having an endless conversation with a human sounding bot? Say you work at a super popular restaurant that has most tables booked out for a month or so, and doesn't have anything ready beyond that, and the bot just walks through a semi-endless list of possible options. I wonder what it sounds like when it runs out of choices, or asked it to get a dinner reservation @ <insert popular place> any evening at any time for the next two months. The weirdest thing about these trained neural nets too is the small tweaks that break them in very interesting ways. The future is truly a surreal place.
  • ferongr 8y ago
    As someone who has briefly worked at a call center, something like Duplex calling me would be preferable to the average person.
• Mizza 8y ago
  Besides creeping dystopia of it, I find this aesthetically disgusting most of all. If you listen to the sample call, the computer voice sounds incredibly _rude_, at least to my ears, especially at the end of the call. I would never speak to a service employee that way. I try to always say a clear and proper please and thank you, and would never ever want a robot to subject somebody to an"uhhhhh, thanks <hang up>" on my behalf. It seems like in addition to the globalization of Californian social and moral standards, the world will now be subjected to Californian manners. What a pity.
  • d1zzy 8y ago
    Let's not get over dramatic here. To sound natural of course the computer system has to copy natural behavior, which includes manners. The experimental version of this system happens to include behavior modeling of phone conversations of people that live where the developers work and live, seems logical. It doesn't mean that the same model will be used in other cultural contexts. An ideal model would copy your behavior (and/or voice), so it would be like you calling. Just have to let Google listen and analyze all your conversations :)
  • lapnitnelav 8y ago
    Looking forward to the Irish version of the closing. Would probably sound like this: -Bye now -Bye -Bye bye b-b-bye [...] This being said, good luck with the accents, the flat Californian is probably a good playground.
  • elicash 8y ago
    I've worked in customer service. This is what I would consider an average call.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    That's how most people I know would make a reservation…
    • Mizza 8y ago
      Exactly, and you're from California. You see this as normal. I'm from England. What Californians see as normal, or casual , or "chill", I think we see as being rude. I think this is extends in personal interactions, professional interactions and customer/company relations like this one. I imagine that if I used this service to place an order to a restaurant, it would order with the Californian "cannIgettuhh", which I would be scalded for as a child. I find it very ugly and I hope that this isn't forced upon the rest of the world. But really, it's just one facet of the way technology is destroying a lot of interpersonal respect. One can even imagine this "deficient design" being taken to it's logical conclusion with the inclusion of belching, grunts, and other inconsiderate bodily sounds. The other poster says not to worry, surely the engineers will be more considerate about other cultures and customs when deploying this technology to the world, but I think that's incredibly naive considering this company's track record.
• jfv 8y ago
  I feel like this is going to make the world even flakier than it already is. If I can waste people's time without even the few minutes it normally takes to make a phone call, what's to stop a restauranteur from effectively denial-of-service attacking competing restaurants, or what's to stop me from booking 100 dinners for Friday evening because I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to want to eat (or who I'm going to take out for that matter -- smartphones make it easy to punt on that decision too), so I retain optionality.
  • MichaelGG 8y ago
    What stops a restauranteur from abusing Google's Gmail service? Presumably Google won't allow you to do spam with Duplex either. If you are going to be more enterprising then you can already do this. Just put some HITs on Mechanical Turk and let them place calls. Should cost you a few bucks to flood hundreds of calls.
    • jfv 8y ago
      I don't need reservations that badly. But the difference between having to specify Mechanical Turk work and just talking to a Google appliance is pretty huge... We're talking hours vs. minutes of work.
      • MichaelGG 8y ago
        But I am saying that it is unlikely Google will let you spam reservations. This idea that some kid will now be able to make 1000 reservations via Google is not probable.
        • jfv 8y ago
          I think it's highly probable that either the technology will be rebuilt in a way that makes abuse possible (Google being relatively open with their technology has this side effect), or that Google won't put in enough safeguards to force people to use it responsibly, but we will see. Maybe you need too many AI experts and too much data to build this technology for yourself, and maybe that only exists at Google.
• NewEntryHN 8y ago
  Just wait for the business to install Duplex on their end, and realize that we have just created the least efficient computer communication protocol ever.
• tlrobinson 8y ago
  This is neat. I'm looking forward to the day where two phone AIs get stuck in some amusing conversation loop. I wonder if this sort of technology will result in some sort of arms race / singularity where everyone, businesses and consumers alike, ends up needing to use phone AIs to stay sane.
• sigi45 8y ago
  I'm really impressed this year. I haven't thought that ML made the advances so much faster than it does already. On one side it is not very impressive that it calls someone but on the other side its tremendous. 2018 we are able to synthesize voice so well and understand already such a small domain. 2018 a system calls a human. We are going so fast already and we should use this google io as something as a social milestone otherwise we wake up tomorrow and totally misses when the future became now. This is just one additional stone to a future where digital becomes a second reality. The advances in voice will not stop. How long will it take, that there is a speech model who can simulate everyone by listing to someone only for seconds or minutes? With this voice etc. computer are able to teach humans. We will be able to scale teaching and a shit tone of other things. I'm impressed.
• annexrichmond 8y ago
  The technology is really awesome but I'm not convinced it will fly: * How much time do people really save, the call in the example is less than a minute. Maybe if you need to call like 10 places it becomes more helpful, but as companies get a bigger online presence (and they are) this technology becomes less useful. You can already make reservations/book appointments, find contracts pretty easily online. * You can't be 100% sure that the AI won't make a mistake or sound like a total jerk on your behalf. Ok sure, the tech will improve but it will be a long time before humans will fully trust AI to represent you. * If people find out you're calling them via some automated bot they're going to think you're a tool. Everyone remember Google Glass? * What the hell is wrong with human interaction anyway? edit: formatting
  • Noos 8y ago
    yeah, my first thought was how useless this is, since it's going to take a lot more time to program the robocall with the information and read the text digest of the order than it is just to call or text yourself. And this thing will have to text digest it, it can't simply record the call without identifying it is doing so, and that's destroying the illusion they are crafting. The tech is extremely impressive, but this use case makes little sense except as a way to humanize it and get people to like it. It has to be more for businesses or some other solution.
  • Kiro 8y ago
    I want as little meaningless human interaction as possible and I can't think of a less meaningful conversation than calling to book something. I also don't care if someone I probably won't even meet thinks I'm a tool for using bleeding edge tech.
  • aplusbi 8y ago
    I have a deaf friend who would love this feature. Sure, a lot of stuff like this can be handled online now, but not 100%. Sometimes you really need to make a phone call, and for some people that's difficult.
    • kharms 8y ago
• zerostar07 8y ago
  The problem they are going after is that small businesses don't have an online appointment system. Wouldn't it be simpler if they made one and offered it for free to all businesses? The voice demo was fun to borderline creepy, but are we really at the point where this can work at scale?
  • koalaman 8y ago
    They could have, but it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun, and they wouldn't have learned nearly as much.
• erdo 8y ago
  Sigh, guess it won't be long before we're all asked to jump through some ludicrous human challenge to confirm we are not a robot every time we call someone
  • cpeterso 8y ago
    I wonder how voice captchas will work. This is inevitable. :)
    • tim333 8y ago
      What's wrong with Wolfie? (Terminator 2). Hopefully the AI won't be quite like that for a while. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9Rurrqg&amp=&feature=youtu.be&amp=&t=50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9Rurrqg&amp=&feature=you...
• mvkel 8y ago
  Never thought the movie Her would come true in my lifetime. And here we are.
  • tim333 8y ago
    As a semi Kurzweil fan I've kind of been expecting his Turing test by 2029 prediction. Things seem pretty much on schedule, perhaps even a tad ahead. Though we'd some breakthroughs to move closer to strong AI. But the hardware is on track and there are an awful lot of top of class PhDs working on the stuff.
• shubidubi 8y ago
  If you speak with a robot you should know that. If you can't tell, the robot should identify itself.
• riazrizvi 8y ago
  I wonder if we could solve phone spamming with this? By having the bot call back any robocall numbers to get one of their human salespeople on the line, and just waste their time. If enough people did it, would it destroy that shitty industry?
• shr1mp 8y ago
  So google is recording the content of our phone conversations? Did this corpus come from Fi?
• ecwilson 8y ago
  There's a great Black Mirror episode in here somewhere. Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply (https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-reply-in-gmail/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-repl...) have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input. You could develop elaborate friendships where both parties are just having their AIs converse and aren't truly aware of each other. What would the social implications of that be? Then a couple years later, the AIs learn how to do business strategy, real-world problem solving, programming, etc and start doing more of our jobs for us. A virus goes around that directs AIs to steal our identities and drain our bank accounts and become autonomous, digital versions of us. The humans have to stage an uprising and use a massive EMP to take back the earth, but destroying all electronics in the process and starting another dark age. I know that's not how AI really works (it's highly specialized and limited), but I'd definitely watch that movie!
  • StavrosK 8y ago
    There was a (bad) book written about this, basically how Gmail's AI took over the world by sending email on behalf of people.
    • tomaskafka 8y ago
      Yes, this one https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13184491-avogadro-corp https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13184491-avogadro-corp
      • ecwilson 8y ago
        Oh god that sounds awful. One of the reviews has all the spoilers. It's truly stupid.
        • StavrosK 8y ago
          Yeah, it was pretty badly written and rather simplistic. Not recommended, you're probably better off reading the spoilered review.
• bo1024 8y ago
  I think it's unethical for a robocaller to incorporate things like "ums" and "ahs" intentionally to deceive people into thinking they're talking to a human. At least, it's disrespectful.
  • amasad 8y ago
    I agree with that. I think it's time for us, the tech industry, to start thinking about the ethical implications of the things we build before we release them. To make this salient for people: imagine this technology being deployed for political robocalls. An attractive voice masquerading as a person persuading people to vote for someone.
    • icebraining 8y ago
      To make this salient for people: imagine this technology being deployed for political robocalls. An attractive voice masquerading as a person persuading people to vote for someone. They already hire telemarketing centers to do political calls; is this really so different?
      • bo1024 8y ago
        I think robots masquerading as humans is unethical (or at least rude/disrespectful) in that context as well.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    I disagree; ums and ahs are just part of the protocol of voice communication, hence robots should use them. I think it should just introduce itself as a robot.
    • bo1024 8y ago
      I think we are in agreement -- I didn't say I thought ums and ahs are unethical on their own, just as part of deceiving someone into thinking they are talking to a human.
  • 8y ago
• mLuby 8y ago
  Is there any information about when this might be available? Or is it just the demo for now.
• cauk 8y ago
  What do you think the likelihood of an open source implementation of this would be in the near future? Either by them or, by them releasing the research?
  • jacksmith21006 8y ago
    Google is pretty amazing for sharing their secrets. Who would ever think they would give away Borg?
• eldavido 8y ago
  I've been building something similar to this for a while called Interval - it's a plain booking engine for small businesses. Obviously nowhere near as good of speech recognition, but it's also not tied to Google, or their baggage. Works over SMS or fbm. https://www.interval.org/ https://www.interval.org/
• erdo 8y ago
  My Google calendar has an occasional duplicates problem, I'm not so sure that Google won't one day make 3 identical restaurant reservations for me by mistake. Hoping that once they've solved robot calls, they'll probably have a go at some of the harder things like synchronization ;)
• lechiffre10 8y ago
  Westworld theme park coming sooner than expected
• swfsql 8y ago
  I had the impression that people got uncomfortable by how fast and dry it says "k--thx", as if it were annoying to talk to the person. In all cases they kind of changed their flow on the hanging up part. I don't know, some seemed nervous. I guess they feel that the machine is quite clear and dry. Also, the girl in the last audio, got a flick flirt haha even said, rushing, "see you next friday" (or something) when hanging up. Once again, my impression. edit: It came to me that, at some point, it will be able to wander off a little, giggle and stuff. So creepy!
• kelvin0 8y ago
  Can we get a conversation between Alexa, Siri and Duplex in the same room? It's a viral video waiting to happen.
• ada1981 8y ago
  This could be great for GOTV efforts and general canvassing. Imagine a system designed in the voice of the candidate that can call you and answer most any questions you have about the platform (or log when you don’t have an answer to be updated later), remind you when to vote, send you a Facebook friend request, etc.
• natch 8y ago
  Web scraping is so yesterday. This is the beginning of robots scraping the real world. Most of the examples Google showed were crafted to make this look like a friendly agent acting on behalf of users. But the more powerful use of this, as illustrated by the deemphasized "holiday hours" example, would be for Google to use it to get any information they wanted out of anybody the robots can call and conduct social engineering on. Imagine coupling this with the knowledge available to someone able to read your gmail inbox. "Hey you sent us an email two days ago about A and B..." (trust is established) "Can you clear up whether you were interested more in A, or more in B?" OK not the perfect script but you get the point.
• dual_basis 8y ago
  How is it that the current implementation of Google Assistant can't even add stuff to my calendar in a natural way? I just tried the following: "OK Google, add an event to my work calendar for a meeting at Starbucks tomorrow morning at 11:30". What was expected: Title: "Meeting" Calendar: "Work" Location: "Starbucks" Date: Tomorrow Time: 11:30am (Bonus points for associating an actual location, but possible ambiguity gives this a pass.) What happened: Title: "My work calendar for a meeting" Calendar: Default Location: None Date: Tomorrow Time: 11:30am
  • kwijibob 8y ago
    This is a great point. The current Google Now and Google Assistant voice controls don't really work half the time, let alone 95% of the time. I really hope all this speech AI really comes good, I really do. But at the moment it still is flaky for me. I really want to use Google Assistant to take instructions and reminders for me. I can't wait until it can smoothly send messages and emails and add calendar entries. Good luck Google.
• baxtr 8y ago
  I’d love to get one of those call and then try to irritate it as much as possible
• sixdimensional 8y ago
  Does anybody know if the tech powering this has anything to do with Google's quantum computing efforts (D-Wave, Bristlecone, etc.)? I feel like it does, especially the natural speech generation. Reason I'm asking is, I am interested in understanding what the intersection of/link between AI/machine learning and quantum computing is, if there is one.
• dep_b 8y ago
  Interesting. If I would know I was talking to an AI I might try to provoke it into giving privacy details like the woman asking for her first name. "What appointments does [name] have for the rest of the day?"
• observer12 8y ago
  Finally, I will be able to order Pizza from the good place that hasn't heard of the internet without actually having to talk to someone.
• d--b 8y ago
  THIS FUCKING SUCKS. I don't care the awesome technical achievement. The fact that I believe that I am talking to a real person but I am not is the worst. Can I call the restaurant and say:"well actually my wife doesn't like being cold so I'm not sure the terrace is going to work tonight" and have the computer answer something completely random is just so bad. The problem is not that the computer doesn't sound natural. The problem is that it cannot deal with out of script requests. In fact the more natural it sounds the more dumb it makes the system appear!
  • spuz 8y ago
    It sounds like you simply want Duplex to be better than it already is, not that you object to the technology in principle. Let's say it can handle requests like position in a restaurant or food specials or <insert complex request here>, would you approve of it?
• juliend2 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's something they have been using themselves in the past few years to gather the opening hours of every single commerce listed on Google Maps. And now making a product out of it.
• lightedman 8y ago
  Oh, look, it's Clippy all over again. No thanks.
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• nitwit005 8y ago
  The voice sounds nice, but successful runs aren't that interesting. If it gets a question it doesn't understand, what does it do, and how does it report it back to the user? It seems like the user is likely to get a certain number of confused recording sent back to them when it fails, and then get stuck manually calling back and explaining what happened.
  • nfoz 8y ago
    Probably by leaving a real human confused or even upset.
• lucio 8y ago
  This is scary. I want to hear Duplex to Duplex conversations. That will be even scarier. Amazing result. This guys should be very proud.
• ilkan 8y ago
  There's a far-future sci-fi novel where "please" and "thank you" are considered insults when spoken to people...bc that's how the wealthy prefaced and ended their computer commands. Vinge, perhaps?
• pbw 8y ago
  When the robo callers get this hell will be unleashed. The only remedy is we all have Duplex-like service answering the phone for us, and let them duke it out. Does Google say anywhere these were all real calls? Or did they call back to cancel the appointments? Because it would be really easy, and tempting, to just fire off 10,000 of these calls to businesses around the country, just to harvest data on how well it does. And leave a massive trail of fake bookings. Even if Google wouldn't do this, the next company attempting this will.
• pbw 8y ago
  This is really horrifying to me. My heart goes out to the working-class retail people who are going to have to spend their days chatting with the AI assistants of upper middle class people too busy to call themselves. If the shop owner gets a duplex system to field the calls, then the two robots can subtly signal to the other they aren't actually human, and then start shrieking like a 9600 baud modem to finish the dialog.
  • everdev 8y ago
    I spent two hours on the phone today with customer support, one of the least enjoyable and least productive ways to spend an afternoon. I try to automate tasks that don't use my strengths or bring me joy and this would be a huge win in that area.
  • hyperpallium 8y ago
    Don't worry, soon they won't have work. That horror awaits us all. BTW AI's can also solve status problems: http://partiallyclips.com/comic/dome-house/ http://partiallyclips.com/comic/dome-house/
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  • iteriteratedone 8y ago
    Juxtapose this with the microsoft build conference ... iot is growing .. microsoft is the os , google is the app ... software engineers have to make good bots
  • discordance 8y ago
    I do feel for them, but at the same time we have these unintentional designs and systems that cause a lot of suffering all over the place. For example, I was kept on hold for 2 hours the other day to try and sort out being double charged on my bankcard. If this sort of service can handle hold, then i'm in.
    • WalterSear 8y ago
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• royalghost 8y ago
  Can it also adjust the accent or tone to make it understand to the other party ? This will be really helpful if I don't have to say my name as R for rock, o for ocean ...
• bigiain 8y ago
  How many Google Voice users do we have here? "To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data. The network uses the output of Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, as well as features from the audio, the history of the conversation, the parameters of the conversation (e.g. the desired service for an appointment, or the current time of day) and more." "Anonymized!" "Honest!" says the surveillance-capitalism advertising mega corp... Luckily I've never been able to use Google Voice - but I doubt they're the only threat actor using phone conversations and metadata to train neural nets... Pretend anonymized or not...
  • jacksmith21006 8y ago
    Add me to the list. Love GV as a great tool for so many use cases. Great for handing out a phone number that is not really your phone number. So for something like students and certain office hours.
• annexrichmond 8y ago
  I already had a comment above about this but another thing I thought of that I don't see anyone discussing: What is the purpose of trying to fool the business owner into thinking it's a real person? It seems unethical, dishonest and disrespectful to the receiver having them believe they are talking to a real person. In the case of an AI failure at least the receiver will understand what's going on instead of becoming really confused. Sometimes I feel people in SV are oblivious to how their software can affect real human beings.
  • spuz 8y ago
    I would guess the purpose of fooling people is that you get a better result. If the call stated with "Hi, I'm a google assistant calling to request a reservation", you might get more hang ups. Of course, the reality could be the opposite as a business owner might make sure to speak more simply and clearly once they know they are speaking to a bot.
• fkistner 8y ago
  I wonder, if this will be confined to one-party consent states/countries for the foreseeable future. Google will most likely want to use recordings to keep fine-tuning and improving upon Duplex, and I don't see them announcing "This call is recorded by Google.", when they're going through such great lengths to convince the called parties that they are talking with a human being.
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• sealthedeal 8y ago
  This is LIT FAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• sytelus 8y ago
  This could be great to answer all the spam calls and keep them engaged so their costs shoots up.
  • nfoz 8y ago
    The spammers are the ones who will have this technology, not the call receivers. Your honeypot is a drop in the bucket.
• siliconc0w 8y ago
  There is something about this that is just a bit unpalatable. Like getting businesses to define their products and services in a common computer-usable format and interface is such an insurmountable problem that we rather build million-to-billion dollar super computers so we can skirt the problem and regress back to the lowest common dominator of communication -the spoken word.
• kentbrew 8y ago
  Weirdly, none of the 449 comments before mine mention the word "porn."
• hyperpallium 8y ago
  I found the first one (female AI, hairdresser) amazingly compelling, but the second (male AI, restaurant) sounded like The Good Doctor's autistic lead character, and to me, the callee sounded bemused at him. Part of this is definitely that the girl voice sounds cute, and this partially disables my cognition. But objectively, her approach is more tentative and polite, whereas the guy voice is more direct and assertive. They might not want the guy voice to take on those feminine qualities, but it would make the interaction work better - so female AI's dominate. The effect on the listener may also help - however, I'm not at all sure that other people (especially women) react as I do to the cute voice. They might even find the the Good Doctor male approach better - though I can't imagine that. The trick of inserting "ums" is very helpful, but because they use the same sound-bite in the same way, it sounds mechanical after you've heard several examples. In the examples towards the end of the page, the odd latencies and (surprising) changes in volume were additionally offpitting. After a few calls, recipients will recognize the patterns (esp if they use the same voice - can they varying voices convincingly?), and it might be better to have an honest reverse-menu system. All that said, the first girl voice was great, and there will be progress.
• victorjuluis 8y ago
  Is this like a dystopian version of my people will contact your people?
• cnees 8y ago
  Maybe I won’t have to overcome my fear of scheduling appointments after all.
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• ilkan 8y ago
  Interesting prototype but not practical beyond trivial use cases yet (plus this is clearly a guy's version of booking a hairdresser.) Generally I'd have other requests like it's a date can we have a quieter side, or view of the game on tv, or it's a birthday party... Also impressed that it could interact with a person "naturally" but ethically the other person should be told that it's a bot and have an option to ask for a callback.
• guilt 8y ago
  Okay, we get it, the tech is there. The moment you put this in restaurants and other places where people need not apply, you're taking away their livelihood. Marie Antoinettes, gen 2.
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• strin 8y ago
  The most terrifying aspect for me is not massive job replacement, but such AI used for robocalls, fraud, ... Imagine you got a phone call that sounds exactly like your mom and asking for help!
• netrus 8y ago
  This is a masterpiece of framing by Google. Am I the only one who does not believe for a second that this technique will be mostly used to do calls for consumers, but to call WITH consumers? We will get back to asking hotlines strange questions to break the algorithm and reach an actual human.
• pulkitsh1234 8y ago
  Next what, phone interviews with Duplex ? Interviews are dreaded by most of the engineers. What are the chances that Google might be testing this in the wild. Given the number of applications they receive.
• iainmerrick 8y ago
  So that’s what “this call may be used for training purposes” means!
• bambax 8y ago
  > transparency is a key part of that Transparency would mean starting the call by saying "I'm a bot from Google".
• nopinsight 8y ago
  Currently there are about 3 million people working in call centers in the US alone and millions more in other countries [1]. Given the technological trajectory, over time there will be less need for people who serve purely as the ‘interface’ using minimal skills and knowledge. At the same time, we still need many more people to work in the physical world: cooking nutritious meals, construction, and caring for the elderly are some examples. Since we cannot assume that everyone can develop skills needed to thrive in demanding technical or knowledge-based jobs, a key priority in many countries should be supporting certain segments of the population to develop the skills and attitude necessary to work in these physical jobs: Most of which are too complex for AI and robotics to effectively replace in the next few decades. In addition, vocational education should be improved and updated to make use of appropriate technology to increase productivity and reduce physical demand on the body. [1] https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-us-call-center-industry-compared-to-india-and-philippines https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-us-c...
• bambax 8y ago
  Google itself (Google Search) is extremely wary of being used by "bots" and uses string of captchas to screen them out. But search is just a machine. That Google would create bots to talk to real people is horrifying. This is only possible if Google doesn't in fact think of working people answering the phone, as really human. This is like doing war with drones instead of soldiers. This may sound over the top, but bear with me. The implicit contract in war is that soldiers are legally authorized to kill because they are risking their own life. Killing people at a distance without risking anyone's life on the side of the shooters, breaks that "contract", is fundamentally unfair and fuels terrorism, because terrorism is the only possible answer. Making a telephone call rests on the same convention: you are allowed to make someone spend time on the phone with you, because you're spending your own time. But if one side is a robot that has no costs, then the relationship loses balance and becomes unsustainable (and this is the reason why Google bans bots on its own servers). This is one more step breaking society, again. The only answer is to either stop accepting phone reservations, or put captchas on the other side.
  • blackbrokkoli 8y ago
    In middle age Europe, designated herolds came to the town centre and recited news and gossip - an equally time consuming contract for both sides. The invention of the Newspaper eliminated that - wouldn't you say that this change was, while disruptive, for the better?
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Newspapers (and listening to heralds) are inherrently pull-based - I choose to engage with them. Robocalls and spam are push-based - you force yourself on me, wasting my time.
    • sah2ed 8y ago
      I think you meant to write "town crier" instead of herald [0], though its wikipedia page does mention herald in the "See also" section. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_crier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_crier
  • 8y ago
• baalimago 8y ago
  This is cool and all, but why not use a web booking system? (yes, i'm partly serious. Why engage in developing an area of technology where there's a much more elegant and efficient solution?)
  • sedatk 8y ago
    could it be for those who don’t have one?
• albertzeyer 8y ago
  I'm wondering: Will people now start to do audio phone captchas?
• sathisihkumar 8y ago
  Amazing features
• erric 8y ago
  I have to wonder if lawmakers will force companies using technologies like this to have their assistants identify as virtual before proceeding with the conversation.
• firexcy 8y ago
  I’m wondering about the legal implications of such feature. By making calls and reservations for the customer, does Google Assistant (and therefore Google) become the agent of the customer as a principal? If it does, shall it consequently take up legal obligations of agents (e.g. reasonable care) and potential responsibilities for its nonfeasance thereof?
• augustl 8y ago
  "Duplex responding to a sync" makes me oddlly emotional. The AI (or "she", as I'm inclined to say), answers the question "are you here" with: > Yeah, I'm here I don't know why, but a machine dynamically saying "I'm here" in a completely naturally sounding way and in a very dynamic context really hits me,
• DEFCON28 8y ago
  Why don’t they think even further ahead and build a robot that cuts your hair?
• alonsonic 8y ago
  Funny how most people here are missing the point of this tech and talking about how this could be achieved by using an API or talking binary over the phone with another bot. The idea here is to leverage an existent merchant base by adapting to how they work today. Suddenly they just integrated to millions of restaurants by adapting to them and not the other way around. I'm sure Google Assistant will first check if there is a way to use tech like OpenTable to make the reservation and fall back to a phone call if there is no better alternative.
  • delaaxe 8y ago
    It seemed to me Google Duplex only works on the receiving side on the phone call. Not sure how much more complex initiating a call is.
• gepeto42 8y ago
  Yes, it would be better if those businesses had systems/APIs for those transactions to be done, but we still live in a world where scanning a sheet of paper that was printed and mailed to you with a phone often reduces friction on the action of moving money between two accounts. That being said, as someone who has used "assistant as a service" stuff before, I wonder how well this will work or how limited it will have to be, and not just because of the AI itself. Even with humans on both sides, it's amazing how hard it can be to get an answer let alone a request fulfilled in a single phone call. Questions about table placement, food allergies or other restrictions could come up, which I wouldn't want going to an operator. I'd rather be told in advance that it is calling the restaurant and have it send me questions in real-time with suggested answer buttons until it learns enough about me not to need them. In other cases, just having it call and stay on hold for me would be useful. "Ok Google, call my mobile operator so I can talk to someone at around 10am" and having it use data it already has from other calls to place the call at around 9:45 and patch me in at the right time would be useful.
• sly010 8y ago
  At the same time, 9out of 10 times when my wife calls me the system pretends it's ringing, while I see no sign of a phone call. Both of us are on Project Fi. (We tried it standing next to each other both of us with full LTE). I guess guess google figured the people will blame each other, not the network. Anyway, I can't keep disabling all the smart features of smart phones, I might just get a new Nokia 3310.
• someearth 8y ago
  Just a side question but related: Is there any good-and-new ML research/model/example for "Language detection"? For example I have a conversation in both English/Russian and I want to segment the input according to each language then handle each language separately.
• ender89 8y ago
  The real application here is that duplex could order you takeout.
• collyw 8y ago
  Phone centers got outsources to India and other places a while back, and while they spoke the language there was definitely a drop in quality of the resulting service. I dread to think what this will be like.
• lrondanini 8y ago
  I'm actually surprise of how many people is impressed by this. I have been using google's assistant technology for a while now. It's amazing! I just wish they release the new voice ASAP! This is what you can do with it: https://vimeo.com/251603335 https://vimeo.com/251603335
• sAbakumoff 8y ago
  The 2nd phone call idea seems to be stolen from Family Guy : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzQ_1MvmDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzQ_1MvmDk
• _nrvs 8y ago
  This is bonkers, makes me want to start a small business just to get these calls and goof around :)
• ipython 8y ago
  I look forward to the day we use this to battle the incessant automated telemarketing calls. Bot vs bot.
• utopcell 8y ago
  Let's have Duplex call up Comcast to negotiate or cancel my service. Then we can call this AI.
• utopcell 8y ago
  I'm curious to see how this plays out. This assistant has a limited set of voices. Imagine an employee receiving reservation requests at a restaurant, being called up dozens of times on the same day, with the same voice, for dozens of different reservations.
• cbhl 8y ago
  It's worth noting that Google Assistant has been able to make reservations with OpenTable since 2014. No need to have Duplex talking to Duplex; it's just protobufs or JSON or XML or whatever people use nowadays for RPCs. Google Duplex is about helping the long-tail -- it's work that is done by studying the needs and processes of the smallest of small businesses, and tailoring a product just for them. I've lost count of the number of college hackathon projects where they say, "oh, push a button and you get a pizza" and they think they'll just put an iPad in the kitchen, and then fizzle out when they get to a real restaurant. In practice, the restaurant might pass around pieces of paper in the kitchen. So you think, oh, I'll put in a thermal receipt printer. But then you realize that they don't have Wi-Fi or internet, so now you have to put in a $70/month internet bill, on top of the phone bill, and a router or two. So you think, "oh, I'll use a fax machine", or "I'll integrate with the point of sale system". But the fax machine runs out of paper, and the point of sale system is an offline piece of ---- running Windows XP. And even if you do get them using an iPad or OpenTable or Yelp or whatever, before you know it, you have waiters writing on a computer monitor with a whiteboard marker: https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-computer-screen/ https://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-wi... But every one of these businesses has a telephone number, whether it's a landline or a cell phone or whatever. When pg says to talk to your customers (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/898476047263518720 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/898476047263518720), he means, talk to your customers. You'll be surprised by what you learn. (Disclaimer: I work at Google, but on YouTube, not on this product.)
• jonas_kgomo 8y ago
  The real issue is, how many wire tappings did Google have to do to have this?
• killjoywashere 8y ago
  Just a note for the record: this has been on the YCombinator frontpage for over 24 hours.
• aussieguy1234 8y ago
  Next time a telemarketer calls, I'd like this to answer the phone
• EamonnMR 8y ago
  This seems really backwards. Talking to people over the phone is a very easy task. Getting through the automated phone system to the person is usually the hard part. Automate that, and you'll be at the top of every app store.
• chx 8y ago
  This technology totes won't be used to mass call politicians to express an opinion on some vote. Totes.
• skookumchuck 8y ago
  During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans infiltrated the American lines with fake Army officers who would give unproductive and confusing orders. The impostors spoke perfect English and often had been raised in the US. The GIs unmasked them by asking them questions about baseball and shooting any with a wrong answer.
• bloodcarter 8y ago
  Actually, we did it on the other side (on a business side) a year ago, you can watch the demo here https://dasha.ai/en/ https://dasha.ai/en/
• itaysk 8y ago
  This is really impressive and all, but what's wrong with saying upfront this is a robot, let it speak it's robotic accent, and let the human know it's speaking to a robot. Assuming this tech is just to bridge current times when most businesses aren't fully automated, and the end goal is to replace BOTH ends of the conversation with robots, in that case the conversation protocol doesn't have to be English, or even voice.
• promeus 8y ago
  I am the only one that sees totally that this product is result of work done for military? Task: Sergeant Google, use everything you have to analyze all audio streams in real time. There are multiple enemies to look for, be alert! Google: Ay, ay chief. Can i use this for my troops to order pizza? Chief: Affirmative. Do it, this is Murica, pizza is important.
• yashksagar 8y ago
  This is only viable for businesses that still use phones. Won't this become obsolete as everything moves online eventually?
• partycoder 8y ago
  One thing that comes to mind is: robocall hell. Combine this with the fact Caller ID is no longer reliable. I think it's time to replace Signaling System 7 with 21st century technology.
• tzm 8y ago
  > 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?
• umeshshaw 8y ago
  Google duplex works on domain specific conversation on which they are trained. why can't we have an AI system which can learn the language from A to Z and all the dictionary words and understand and then speak or read anything normally, the way human does.