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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 wh

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.

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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.
- alonmower 8y ago
  Ya, I agree that an API is the right solution but the benefit of this is that both sides aren't forced to adopt it at the same time, it's more resilient to changes on either side...
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Where did I say it’s trivial? What I’m saying is, people ar anthropomorphizing and extrapolating what this system is doing far above what it is actually doing, and then using it to justify fears that Skynet’s around the corner. This system can’t pass the Turing test, it would be fooled probably by a simple question about itself or a subject outside the domain, like the kind of food you like. You’ve got people in this thread hyperventilating about AI duping your voice and the. Becoming a doppelgänger and therefore we need laws immediately to stop this dystopia? Let’s calm your cortisol levels for a second and stop acting like Thanos just got the last gem.
  - musage 8y ago
    > We’ve arrived at full Luddism now where life saving and time saving technology in fields like health, transportation, and customer service will be inhibited by hyperbolic fearmongering. The irony of this is too rich for you to find out in your own lifetime, but I'll thank you in the name of those able to notice it.
  - steve_musk 8y ago
    I don't think any technically minded people on HN are extrapolating what this system is capable of doing, but are (rightly IMO) extrapolating what kind of systems will be announced in 2, 5, 10, etc. I think even HN is greatly underestimating what world class researchers paired with an army of world class engineering talent are capable of.
  - empath75 8y ago
    I think it passes a limited Turing test at the domain it’s trained in. I doubt any of the people on the other end of the call would even suspect it’s a computer. That’s an amazing achievement.
- floatrock 8y ago
  > The end game is clearly to use an api, not this. My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all. Voice bots like this will have the advantage of ubiquity. At least a couple years ago before every resteraunt had 5 tablets for all their seamless/grubhub/chowhound/whatever apps, pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering. Although there were clearly better ways of doing it (see how Dominos reinvented itself as a tech company), the sheer ubiquity of fax as the lowest common denominator kept the tech around. In that light, it's kinda like the cell-phones-leapfrogging-landlines-in-developing-countries argument... part of the wechat story involves a massive population entering the consumer class at a time when everything was digital. Call me out if this is a gross over-generalization, but in a way, the wechat population never had to deal with the backwards-compatibility of people growing up ordering a pizza over the phone. It'll be interesting to see how the API-centric approach (wechat) plays out versus the lowest-common-denominator ubiquity approach (voicebots). I'd stop short of calling API's the end game though.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering The fax machine is still around now, and heavily used in the medical context: https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american-medical-system-fax-machines-why https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
  - booleandilemma 8y ago
    My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all. Meanwhile in NYC, good luck getting the bodega on the corner to even take your debit card.
    - eric_h 8y ago
      Eh? The vast majority of bodegas in NYC take credit cards. Many have minimums, or charge a fee if you don't hit the minimum. But I've not been to a bodega in the last ~5 years that didn't accept credit cards in one form or another. > 5 years ago, sure, but now pretty much everyone's got them (even in the rougher neighborhoods). If they don't accept cards, they almost always have an ATM. My complaint in NYC is the uptick of "cashless" places, that don't accept legal US tender. I like using cash, I don't want it to go away.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Please go and convince the mom and pop hardware store or bakery in your town to use an API instead of answering the phone.
  - empath75 8y ago
    They’ll do that before getting a robot to answer the phone for them.
    - fwip 8y ago
      Why do you say that?
      - empath75 8y ago
        Because they do it all the time. Open table already solved this problem for 90 percent of restaurants.
- avinium 8y ago
  If you ever needed proof of the negativity in the tech community, this thread is it. Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".
  - zbentley 8y ago
    One time, a giant tech company staffed by geniuses released a super-useful tool that saw massive adoption. 10 years later that tool became technical debt. Wait, it was way less than 10 years. I'm talking about Google Realtime. Or reader? Or buzz? No, wait, I'm talking about aggressive Twitter API deprecation/removal. Wait, nevermind, I'm talking about Facebook. You get the idea. What's revolutionary today sometimes becomes the substrate for future innovation. Sometimes it gets cast by the wayside, even in the face of significant "user" (developer) popularity. That's not proof of negativity; just realism. Negativity would be "no new innovation will ever get traction". Optimism would be "all new technologies will change the world" (c.f. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended). This is neither.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Because idea of running machine2machine communication through Duplex, going binary -> text -> voice -> text -> binary, is just fucking dumb. It's not proof of negativity in the tech community. If anything, it's a proof that tech community often can't pause and look if a particular idea makes engineering sense. That's how we ended up with Electron.
punnerud 8y ago
To save CPU/GPU/TPU there should be a high-frequency sound, as in people can’t hear, so the computers talking to each other and switch to a faster way to communicate. If this is included you also have way to detect if you are talking to a bot/duplex.
- lukeqsee 8y ago
  Did we just reinvent dialup?
  - sxates 8y ago
    Human-readable modem handshake.
    - insensible 8y ago
      I want to hear a Duplex voice giving verbal AT commands.
      - Piskvorrr 8y ago
        +++ATH0
- danpalmer 8y ago
  You’re totally right. However while this is useful to bootstrap a new technology rollout, 10 years on its just technical debt. The amount of tech debt in the system behind credit cards is crazy, because originally charges where phoned in to the card issuer manually, and everything from then on - magstripe, chip & PIN, online only transactions, etc, has all been built on top, and the leaky abstractions show through in daily difficulties with the card system for end users, like lack of real-time balance (in some cases), lack of transaction metadata, etc.
  - derefr 8y ago
    On the other hand, the credit card system's backcompat does mean that you can still accept credit cards when the power's out. You just write down the number (or use an imprint machine) and let the customer go. And the semantics of credit mean that you can still make that charge even if an online transaction would have resulted in a decline—offline transactions are never declined, they just cause overdrafts.
justonepost 8y ago
The problem is that computers will now be interacting with people and people will become unsure of whether they are taking to a computer or a person. It will create a bewildering world full of mistrust. I would argue that there should be a law proclaiming that computers must identify themselves.
- floatrock 8y ago
  They're not unaware of this concern. From the article: > The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.
  - xg15 8y ago
    So they indicate that they are aware of the problem - and instead of doing a straight-forward "hey, I'm a bot", their suggested strategies are "being clear about the intent of the call" and "experiment with the right approach over the coming months"? To me that quote sounds more like a polite way of saying they definitely won't reveal to callers that they are talking with a bot than them taking the concern seriously. Some of the conversation examples on the blog page where they invent a sort of story for the caller ("I'm calling for a client") would fit that theory.
    - mauriciob 8y ago
      People are prejudiced against talking to bots because of how bad they are currently. I despise calling services that have voice recognition, often times it's easier to have an options menu. If they can get a way of saying "I'm a bot" without people hanging up the calls, I'm all for it -- otherwise, "I'm calling for a client" or similar is the best for everyone involved (assuming everything works). Businesses also need to have a way to report problems to Google, like if they are getting spammed by Duplex or want to opt out.
ErikAugust 8y ago
"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." So, you would just have an automated booking system API which is better handled by not placing calls as its form of communication. Right?
- Drakim 8y ago
  The point being is that it's a human speech API which is easier for humans to utilize "manually" if they don't have a robot servant.
  - aurailious 8y ago
    I prefer not to call them servants, it would be better to start calling them partners actually, just in case we call them master some day.
    - Notorious_BLT 8y ago
      Partner also just has a nicer feel to it. I don't like the idea of thinking of anyone/anything as a servant, but I do like the idea of someone/something assisting me.
- Kalium 8y ago
  Yes! This is an API that requires no computer on the user's end and is portable across different implementations from different companies. It's not ideal. Actual standardized APIs are better. But, uh, have you ever worked with industry standard APIs? I have, and standardized is not how I would describe them.
  - imnotadoctor999 8y ago
    I still think there's a need for standardized APIs in this situation. At some point, the context constraints mentioned in the blog post have to get translated into some action with parameters. I'm guessing that action will be API calls to other Google products behind the Duplex Google Assistant UX. "Ok Google, can you reschedule my Dr. Appointment this Friday for next week? I have a conflict." -> calls the Dr and reschedules -> adapts result to rebooking action with partners (ie, an api call to your Google calendar) -> applies action and responds to you. There is still quite a bit missing from this to be a useful AI product. It's getting really close though. I can't wait until this makes it into Google Assistant and it can call a restaurant to ask about gluten free options while I'm driving.
braindongle 8y ago
Absolutely correct. And so-called general AI may never happen. Regardless, this is shocking. It immediately needs to be factored into any speculation about what the world will look like in 20 years. Innumerable questions.
- whazor 8y ago
  Maybe a general AI is just a very big collection of many smaller abilities.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    The older I get, the more true I suspect this is.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      Of course there is more to human intelligence than a list of abilities like "booking a reservation" or "translate French to English".
wyck 8y ago
> People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, But that in itself is not even true across the industry, some(most) phone bookings are very complex, otherwise they would just use a web interface.
- hk__2 8y ago
  > But that in itself is not even true across the industry, some(most) phone bookings are very complex Citation needed for that "(most)". I work for a company with a call center and a large part of calls are simple ones that could be easily answered by just reading the FAQ page on our website. > otherwise they would just use a web interface. I think the problem is more about resources. My local hairdresser use his phone and a notebook to take bookings. It takes a bit of his time and could easily be replaced by a Web interface but he doesn’t have any resource for that (and some people still prefer using their phones).
  - jscholes 8y ago
    > I think the problem is more about resources. My local hairdresser use his phone and a notebook to take bookings. It takes a bit of his time and could easily be replaced by a Web interface but he doesn’t have any resource for that By "resources", do you mean money? Because if so I can't imagine the purchase and training of Duplex on the business side would come cheap either.
seanp2k2 8y ago
That end game seems very wasteful and Rube Goldbergian. Why use an 1800s technology as the transport layer when salons, yoga studios, and more already use things like MindBody, which already has an appointments API? I’d honestly be way more interested if this integrated with MindBody, OpenTable, DMV websites, car dealer appointment systems, medical office scheduling systems — all of which already have APIs or at least web pages. But then, saying that you wrote and will maintain some WWW mechanize stuff that posts forms is way less marketable to the general population who see this as magic. Also, they’ll discontinue it after a year once it gets enough negative press about how it doesn’t work well and loses business for businesses.
- pscsbs 8y ago
  Likely it'll be a transition technology for businesses still using phone appointments as their primary API, and eventually it'll ease the path for more direct integration.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Because businesses can offer Duplex for customers to call and speak to after hours if they still want to keep a human phone assistant. It's modular, not Rube Goldbergian.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  You also seem to completely miss that outside of silicon valley, large portions of the population actually want to interact with things by phone. That's changing for sure, but the demand for phone based services is still very high.
- fantispug 8y ago
  Because there are lots of businesses that don't have a booking API and don't see the need for one, or can't afford one. This kind of technology allows interaction with them, because it's easier to interact on a common transport protocol than to expect everyone to change to your preferred one. That being said I feel like it won't be long until this tech is used for scamming, phishing and pranks.
- dominotw 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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freyir 8y ago
> 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. And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.
- viraptor 8y ago
  This doesn't even need to happen on the voice connection. A register of "does this number map to a known system" would be enough. Then it's just up to common APIs.
- stfwn 8y ago
  A large part of introducing new tech is enabling the transition from existing tech. Maybe if we scrapped all old cars and allowed only autonomously vehicles we’d be be sleeping at 120 km/h next week. But some businesses still run on COBOL.
- adtac 8y ago
  Lol imagine my phone talking with an automated customer service line. Two machines, talking to one another, not using any of the existing protocols. My phone would have a database of questions to ask, form it into an English sentence, run it through a text-to-speech, transmit this to the other phone. Their "phone" would run a speech-to-text, run NLP, match it with its own database, and do the whole thing again in the opposite direction. This gives a whole new meaning to "all of UI/UX is basically prettifying database queries".
  - bbleciel 8y ago
    "all of UI/UX is basically prettifying database queries" - are you saying that generally speaking or is that a reference an article or articles? Would love to read more about it if so-
    - kpennell 8y ago
      me too.
tracker1 8y ago
As long as there's a way out of the AVR system... too often, you get trapped when you want something that isn't an option.
- seanp2k2 8y ago
  When you mash 0 with Comcast, it kind of scoffs at you and tells you that it needs some information before it can help you. If you keep hitting 0 it just hangs up. Pretty terrible experience, but they don’t have to care because they have monopolized so many neighborhoods.
econ101isSexist 8y ago
Dude, this system has better conversation skills than me. I mean literally. Well, I'am autistic + esl (+ kinda too why). But still it's kinda incredible that a system is actually better.
- insensible 8y ago
  Yes, that first restaurant reservation would have taken me several times as long to complete.
- darkmighty 8y ago
  "The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    Who in the 70's thought AI would be defined by being good at chess? I mean it can just about brute force the game; how is that intelligent? The Turing test is way older and seems to have been the standard measure since it's inception.
    - darkmighty 8y ago
      First of all you can't brute force the chess. Algorithms that beat high level chess players are non-trivial, even with todays computers. In fact top engines today all use carefully designed heuristics hand-crafted by experts -- this notion that Big Blue, Deep fritz, etc were dumb "brute force search engines" is a misleading tale. Second, in the 70s there was no computer power even for quite clever algorithms (that probably didn't exist yet) to beat top chess players. Chess was seen as a grand goal requiring utmost intelligence -- while it is obvious in hindsight, at the time the intuition was probably that extremely "intelligent" humans were required to play chess, and in fact the best chess players were among the most "intelligent" persons -- it was a clear exclusively intellectual task that few people were competent at. So many believed that chess would be one of the greatest challenges to AI (the clarity of the rules added convenience of research and implementation). Things like walking didn't seem intellectually demanding, so the common sense was that it is probably "easy". In fact today we know that navigating a bipedal robot in a simple environment through visual recognition is vastly more difficult computationally than playing chess well, it is only easier for us because we have highly specialized circuitry in our brain hat is well matched to those tasks. Our brain wetware is not very well matched to playing chess. Also chatbots have been doing pretty well on Turing's original definition of a Turing test, ever since about 10 years ago. But now it is being argued that Turing didn't really see the "loopholes" they believe the bots are exploiting, and are coming up with more strict requirements for a Turing test. That's totally in line with Tao's argument that every time we approach a major AI goal, suddenly it is not AI anymore, because there's nothing magical about it, just boring old technology. And human brains are magical, right? Until every obscure niche capability of humans has been dominated in every possible way by AIs many won't want to concede that it really is AI. And even when it does become better than us in every possible way, I suspect a few will still find arbitrary reasons why it really isn't AI/AGI, e.g. because it is not organic, because the computer lacks a body, because it lacks a "soul", etc.
nradov 8y ago
It's unfortunate that in 2018 we still have to resort to klugey work arounds like this with so many restaurants and hair salons instead of being able to make reservations online. There are services like OpenTable but even here in Silicon Valley only a small minority of restaurants use them. It seems like there's a huge opportunity if someone can crack the market.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to picking up the phone and talking to someone.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    That's the universal criticism of every technology. "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to looking up directions to wherever they're driving before they get in the car." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to paying their bills every month." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to carrying cash around and counting change." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to coming over and talking in person." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to washing their dishes by hand." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to doing long division."
  - shados 8y ago
    I don't mind talking to "someone". But I sure mind talking to customer service folks who have absolutely no interest in talking to me and make it as difficult as realistically possible. Worse, they're probably gonna spend 3/4th of the time trying to sell me shit I don't want and make me fight against it. Online, I can ignore any prompt and just click next next next finish, and the form won't be in a bad mood. I have no interest in talking to an annoyed clerk, and they obviously don't want to talk to me, so we can just avoid each other.
    - danShumway 8y ago
davemel37 8y ago
> 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. I think this perspective is very short sighted. You will lose customers to automation, but businesses wont turn away customers because of automation. Customers and prospects don't want to interact with machines, but businesses should be willing to give customers what they want. The idea that a tool can be rolled out to millions of consumers, even with limited use cases and not have to get adoption from businesses to be useful is IMHO a much bigger opportunity and much better use case than rolling out a tool to businesses that make the interaction less personal. Customers need to trust businesses, business only need to collect money from customers. I think everyone who focuses on chatbots from the business use case perspective is missing the bigger opportunity. A technology that can give a consumer access to ALL businesses, not just the ones who adopt a new technology offers much more utility than serving businesses or the shortsighted use cases like saving time and money for the business.
- ZainRiz 8y ago
  Uh...businesses have been automating phone calls for decades now
  - davemel37 8y ago
    Thats partially my point. Everyone is thinking about the business case for cost saving around automation for businesses, but that lacks imagination. Automation tools for consumers to interact with humans at businesses is where the real opportunity lies. Would you ever voluntarily use an IVR? I wouldn't. If I am going to interact with automation for a business, I want to do it with a different interface than voice... all the hype around NLP and chatbots was uninspired and focused on the wrong side of the interaction... Building conversational interfaces for consumers to use to interact with businesses is a much better use case.
ZainRiz 8y ago
As crazy as it seems at first glance, a double Duplex system would be a really beneficial result. What stops businesses from setting up Apis from scheduling services today? It's the lack of a universal API. If a barber shop wants to make it possible for a 3rd party app to book appointments then they have to release some API. But that's not the end of it. The 3rd party app has to first discover their Api, someone has to understand it and write code to use it, and then deploy that code. I'll repeat for emphasis: This is mainly a problem today because there is no universal Api that all services can use With Duplex, verbals speech becomes a universal Api that every service can parse and communicate to each other with. Also, the discoverability is taken care of by using publicly cataloged phone numbers on services like Google Maps, Yelp, etc
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  No, it doesn't. The problem of universal API is entirely orthogonal to voice communications. Duplex is not a Turnig-complete system, it's just an API behind a voice recognition layer. All the important problems for universal APIs happen after that layer. Ultimately, what you describe can work perfectly only when everyone is using Duplex, which is equivalent to everyone using Google-defined API. That's not universal, because you have one entity behind it. The only way this brings us somewhat closer to universal API is that if you expect it to handle humans as well, it introduces some constraints to the space of possible APIs, which could make it easier for everyone to agree on a common format. Constraints of natural language processing without a human-level AI require your API to be very fuzzy and very lenient. There's nothing stopping one from implementing those same constraints over a text or binary protocol. Nothing except no reason for businesses to do it.
  - ZainRiz 8y ago
    Everyone doesn't have to use Duplex, everyone would have to use a system that allows it to seem like a human is talking to the other person, provided you limit the context to a particular domain (like taking reservations). This system could be developed by any company with sufficiently advanced ML chops
luckydata 8y ago
You gotta be kidding. If it was that easy why didn't you build it yourself? Easy billion right there.
- icebraining 8y ago
  cromwellan didn't say it was easy. It's still hard to do something limited.
- rpeden 8y ago
  Well, cromwellian works at Google, so maybe he did build it himself. :)
andrepd 8y ago
>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. Is this satire? If this is indeed the future, I wonder if there is an irresistible urge to make systems as inefficient as possible. Kind of "like gases expand to fill the container, applications become as inefficient as the power of the hardware allows".
cma 8y ago
You have to see it in use too. The Milo demo from Microsoft was much more impressive, but completely fake.
hkmurakami 8y ago
I imagined both the booker and bookee using a call automater / reception automater to make the appointment in the future.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls And those will have online booking systems already - I don't see how this technology is still relevant nowadays. Maybe it was back in the 90's when the internet (and online booking) was a new thing, but now? I can't see there's a big market for this application.
b34r 8y ago
It’s the lack of indication that you’re talking to an automated assistant and that fact that it uses human affectations in its speech that creeps me out hardcore.
nickbauman 8y ago
Small business do have email. I use email to do this kind of thing all the time and it works extremely well. I feel like this is a case of silicon valley solving marginal problems while the world burns.
utopcell 8y ago
To the extend that the primary application for this is call support, I don't agree with your proposal. This is supposed to close the gap between a tech-savvy group that would be using duplex and tech-handicapped small businesses. It is much easier / effective for a restaurant for example to hook up with open table than deploy something like business-duplex.
- lorenzorhoades 8y ago
  Exactly. If a small business doesn't use open table or duplex, no problem - I can just use duplex to schedule the reservation for me. Open table requires buy in from the restaurant, duplex doesn't.
vertexFarm 8y ago
I feel like a lot of people who are pointing out the limitations show a failure in imagination of where this will go in the future. I don't care about the obscure technical limitations now, those are just engineering problems that will be solved in very short time. I'm not afraid of the machines going all singularity or skynet or whatever, becoming sentient and taking over the world as some kind of robo-Hitler. That's moronic. But what does worry me is the normalization of having a machine do everything for you, plan your whole life, access every little detail of every bit of your personal data and lifestyle. Of course we've already had that for a while with the way phones work. But this is another step towards getting public consensus for using it in new ways. Once people are used to this, we'll have more and more systems with conversational software that manages your life for you. Speaks on your behalf. Interfaces with the world for you because doing it yourself is far too stressful and inconvenient. And of course it'll be a free, advertising-supported model so all that data will have to be shared with, among many things, shady political organizations to try to gain every little advantage possible to manipulate public opinion and steer themselves into enormous power. Think of where the cell phone started off: just a phone in your pocket. It's so much more now. Remember that when thinking about these AI assistants and what they will develop into. I'm not afraid of the classical AI apocalypse. I'm afraid that these systems will do exactly what they're designed to do. That people are underestimating just how much power lies in these little inconveniences in life, once they're all added up and analyzed and tallied.
sheeshkebab 8y ago
Umm...hmm...I got you.
amrx101 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. A colleague of mine is just going on about this.
susanhi 8y ago
You’re only looking at what it is today. You just need to extrapolate enough into the future to see how deeply disturbing this really is.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
The Turing Test is irrelevant, the "dystopian" stuff is mostly irrelevant, the ethics are highly relevant. It is simply unethical for a computer to converse with a human while misleading them into believing they are talking to a human. There are a zillion reasons why this is so, if none of them seem obvious then I'd suggest investing some time to take an ethics course.

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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.
alonmower 8y ago
Ya, I agree that an API is the right solution but the benefit of this is that both sides aren't forced to adopt it at the same time, it's more resilient to changes on either side...
cromwellian 8y ago
Where did I say it’s trivial? What I’m saying is, people ar anthropomorphizing and extrapolating what this system is doing far above what it is actually doing, and then using it to justify fears that Skynet’s around the corner. This system can’t pass the Turing test, it would be fooled probably by a simple question about itself or a subject outside the domain, like the kind of food you like. You’ve got people in this thread hyperventilating about AI duping your voice and the. Becoming a doppelgänger and therefore we need laws immediately to stop this dystopia? Let’s calm your cortisol levels for a second and stop acting like Thanos just got the last gem.
- musage 8y ago
  > We’ve arrived at full Luddism now where life saving and time saving technology in fields like health, transportation, and customer service will be inhibited by hyperbolic fearmongering. The irony of this is too rich for you to find out in your own lifetime, but I'll thank you in the name of those able to notice it.
- steve_musk 8y ago
  I don't think any technically minded people on HN are extrapolating what this system is capable of doing, but are (rightly IMO) extrapolating what kind of systems will be announced in 2, 5, 10, etc. I think even HN is greatly underestimating what world class researchers paired with an army of world class engineering talent are capable of.
- empath75 8y ago
  I think it passes a limited Turing test at the domain it’s trained in. I doubt any of the people on the other end of the call would even suspect it’s a computer. That’s an amazing achievement.
floatrock 8y ago
> The end game is clearly to use an api, not this. My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all. Voice bots like this will have the advantage of ubiquity. At least a couple years ago before every resteraunt had 5 tablets for all their seamless/grubhub/chowhound/whatever apps, pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering. Although there were clearly better ways of doing it (see how Dominos reinvented itself as a tech company), the sheer ubiquity of fax as the lowest common denominator kept the tech around. In that light, it's kinda like the cell-phones-leapfrogging-landlines-in-developing-countries argument... part of the wechat story involves a massive population entering the consumer class at a time when everything was digital. Call me out if this is a gross over-generalization, but in a way, the wechat population never had to deal with the backwards-compatibility of people growing up ordering a pizza over the phone. It'll be interesting to see how the API-centric approach (wechat) plays out versus the lowest-common-denominator ubiquity approach (voicebots). I'd stop short of calling API's the end game though.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering The fax machine is still around now, and heavily used in the medical context: https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american-medical-system-fax-machines-why https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all. Meanwhile in NYC, good luck getting the bodega on the corner to even take your debit card.
  - eric_h 8y ago
    Eh? The vast majority of bodegas in NYC take credit cards. Many have minimums, or charge a fee if you don't hit the minimum. But I've not been to a bodega in the last ~5 years that didn't accept credit cards in one form or another. > 5 years ago, sure, but now pretty much everyone's got them (even in the rougher neighborhoods). If they don't accept cards, they almost always have an ATM. My complaint in NYC is the uptick of "cashless" places, that don't accept legal US tender. I like using cash, I don't want it to go away.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
Please go and convince the mom and pop hardware store or bakery in your town to use an API instead of answering the phone.
- empath75 8y ago
  They’ll do that before getting a robot to answer the phone for them.
  - fwip 8y ago
    Why do you say that?
    - empath75 8y ago
      Because they do it all the time. Open table already solved this problem for 90 percent of restaurants.
avinium 8y ago
If you ever needed proof of the negativity in the tech community, this thread is it. Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".
- zbentley 8y ago
  One time, a giant tech company staffed by geniuses released a super-useful tool that saw massive adoption. 10 years later that tool became technical debt. Wait, it was way less than 10 years. I'm talking about Google Realtime. Or reader? Or buzz? No, wait, I'm talking about aggressive Twitter API deprecation/removal. Wait, nevermind, I'm talking about Facebook. You get the idea. What's revolutionary today sometimes becomes the substrate for future innovation. Sometimes it gets cast by the wayside, even in the face of significant "user" (developer) popularity. That's not proof of negativity; just realism. Negativity would be "no new innovation will ever get traction". Optimism would be "all new technologies will change the world" (c.f. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended). This is neither.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Because idea of running machine2machine communication through Duplex, going binary -> text -> voice -> text -> binary, is just fucking dumb. It's not proof of negativity in the tech community. If anything, it's a proof that tech community often can't pause and look if a particular idea makes engineering sense. That's how we ended up with Electron.

punnerud 8y ago

To save CPU/GPU/TPU there should be a high-frequency sound, as in people can’t hear, so the computers talking to each other and switch to a faster way to communicate. If this is included you also have way to detect if you are talking to a bot/duplex.

lukeqsee 8y ago
Did we just reinvent dialup?
- sxates 8y ago
  Human-readable modem handshake.
  - insensible 8y ago
    I want to hear a Duplex voice giving verbal AT commands.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      +++ATH0
danpalmer 8y ago
You’re totally right. However while this is useful to bootstrap a new technology rollout, 10 years on its just technical debt. The amount of tech debt in the system behind credit cards is crazy, because originally charges where phoned in to the card issuer manually, and everything from then on - magstripe, chip & PIN, online only transactions, etc, has all been built on top, and the leaky abstractions show through in daily difficulties with the card system for end users, like lack of real-time balance (in some cases), lack of transaction metadata, etc.
- derefr 8y ago
  On the other hand, the credit card system's backcompat does mean that you can still accept credit cards when the power's out. You just write down the number (or use an imprint machine) and let the customer go. And the semantics of credit mean that you can still make that charge even if an online transaction would have resulted in a decline—offline transactions are never declined, they just cause overdrafts.

justonepost 8y ago

The problem is that computers will now be interacting with people and people will become unsure of whether they are taking to a computer or a person. It will create a bewildering world full of mistrust. I would argue that there should be a law proclaiming that computers must identify themselves.

floatrock 8y ago
They're not unaware of this concern. From the article: > The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.
- xg15 8y ago
  So they indicate that they are aware of the problem - and instead of doing a straight-forward "hey, I'm a bot", their suggested strategies are "being clear about the intent of the call" and "experiment with the right approach over the coming months"? To me that quote sounds more like a polite way of saying they definitely won't reveal to callers that they are talking with a bot than them taking the concern seriously. Some of the conversation examples on the blog page where they invent a sort of story for the caller ("I'm calling for a client") would fit that theory.
  - mauriciob 8y ago
    People are prejudiced against talking to bots because of how bad they are currently. I despise calling services that have voice recognition, often times it's easier to have an options menu. If they can get a way of saying "I'm a bot" without people hanging up the calls, I'm all for it -- otherwise, "I'm calling for a client" or similar is the best for everyone involved (assuming everything works). Businesses also need to have a way to report problems to Google, like if they are getting spammed by Duplex or want to opt out.

ErikAugust 8y ago

"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." So, you would just have an automated booking system API which is better handled by not placing calls as its form of communication. Right?

Drakim 8y ago
The point being is that it's a human speech API which is easier for humans to utilize "manually" if they don't have a robot servant.
- aurailious 8y ago
  I prefer not to call them servants, it would be better to start calling them partners actually, just in case we call them master some day.
  - Notorious_BLT 8y ago
    Partner also just has a nicer feel to it. I don't like the idea of thinking of anyone/anything as a servant, but I do like the idea of someone/something assisting me.
Kalium 8y ago
Yes! This is an API that requires no computer on the user's end and is portable across different implementations from different companies. It's not ideal. Actual standardized APIs are better. But, uh, have you ever worked with industry standard APIs? I have, and standardized is not how I would describe them.
- imnotadoctor999 8y ago
  I still think there's a need for standardized APIs in this situation. At some point, the context constraints mentioned in the blog post have to get translated into some action with parameters. I'm guessing that action will be API calls to other Google products behind the Duplex Google Assistant UX. "Ok Google, can you reschedule my Dr. Appointment this Friday for next week? I have a conflict." -> calls the Dr and reschedules -> adapts result to rebooking action with partners (ie, an api call to your Google calendar) -> applies action and responds to you. There is still quite a bit missing from this to be a useful AI product. It's getting really close though. I can't wait until this makes it into Google Assistant and it can call a restaurant to ask about gluten free options while I'm driving.

braindongle 8y ago

Absolutely correct. And so-called general AI may never happen. Regardless, this is shocking. It immediately needs to be factored into any speculation about what the world will look like in 20 years. Innumerable questions.

whazor 8y ago
Maybe a general AI is just a very big collection of many smaller abilities.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  The older I get, the more true I suspect this is.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    Of course there is more to human intelligence than a list of abilities like "booking a reservation" or "translate French to English".

wyck 8y ago

> People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, But that in itself is not even true across the industry, some(most) phone bookings are very complex, otherwise they would just use a web interface.

hk__2 8y ago
> But that in itself is not even true across the industry, some(most) phone bookings are very complex Citation needed for that "(most)". I work for a company with a call center and a large part of calls are simple ones that could be easily answered by just reading the FAQ page on our website. > otherwise they would just use a web interface. I think the problem is more about resources. My local hairdresser use his phone and a notebook to take bookings. It takes a bit of his time and could easily be replaced by a Web interface but he doesn’t have any resource for that (and some people still prefer using their phones).
- jscholes 8y ago
  > I think the problem is more about resources. My local hairdresser use his phone and a notebook to take bookings. It takes a bit of his time and could easily be replaced by a Web interface but he doesn’t have any resource for that By "resources", do you mean money? Because if so I can't imagine the purchase and training of Duplex on the business side would come cheap either.

seanp2k2 8y ago

That end game seems very wasteful and Rube Goldbergian. Why use an 1800s technology as the transport layer when salons, yoga studios, and more already use things like MindBody, which already has an appointments API? I’d honestly be way more interested if this integrated with MindBody, OpenTable, DMV websites, car dealer appointment systems, medical office scheduling systems — all of which already have APIs or at least web pages. But then, saying that you wrote and will maintain some WWW mechanize stuff that posts forms is way less marketable to the general population who see this as magic. Also, they’ll discontinue it after a year once it gets enough negative press about how it doesn’t work well and loses business for businesses.

pscsbs 8y ago
Likely it'll be a transition technology for businesses still using phone appointments as their primary API, and eventually it'll ease the path for more direct integration.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
Because businesses can offer Duplex for customers to call and speak to after hours if they still want to keep a human phone assistant. It's modular, not Rube Goldbergian.
DannyBee 8y ago
You also seem to completely miss that outside of silicon valley, large portions of the population actually want to interact with things by phone. That's changing for sure, but the demand for phone based services is still very high.
fantispug 8y ago
Because there are lots of businesses that don't have a booking API and don't see the need for one, or can't afford one. This kind of technology allows interaction with them, because it's easier to interact on a common transport protocol than to expect everyone to change to your preferred one. That being said I feel like it won't be long until this tech is used for scamming, phishing and pranks.
dominotw 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

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freyir 8y ago

> 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. And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.

viraptor 8y ago
This doesn't even need to happen on the voice connection. A register of "does this number map to a known system" would be enough. Then it's just up to common APIs.
stfwn 8y ago
A large part of introducing new tech is enabling the transition from existing tech. Maybe if we scrapped all old cars and allowed only autonomously vehicles we’d be be sleeping at 120 km/h next week. But some businesses still run on COBOL.
adtac 8y ago
Lol imagine my phone talking with an automated customer service line. Two machines, talking to one another, not using any of the existing protocols. My phone would have a database of questions to ask, form it into an English sentence, run it through a text-to-speech, transmit this to the other phone. Their "phone" would run a speech-to-text, run NLP, match it with its own database, and do the whole thing again in the opposite direction. This gives a whole new meaning to "all of UI/UX is basically prettifying database queries".
- bbleciel 8y ago
  "all of UI/UX is basically prettifying database queries" - are you saying that generally speaking or is that a reference an article or articles? Would love to read more about it if so-
  - kpennell 8y ago
    me too.

tracker1 8y ago

As long as there's a way out of the AVR system... too often, you get trapped when you want something that isn't an option.

seanp2k2 8y ago
When you mash 0 with Comcast, it kind of scoffs at you and tells you that it needs some information before it can help you. If you keep hitting 0 it just hangs up. Pretty terrible experience, but they don’t have to care because they have monopolized so many neighborhoods.

econ101isSexist 8y ago

Dude, this system has better conversation skills than me. I mean literally. Well, I'am autistic + esl (+ kinda too why). But still it's kinda incredible that a system is actually better.

insensible 8y ago
Yes, that first restaurant reservation would have taken me several times as long to complete.
darkmighty 8y ago
"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Who in the 70's thought AI would be defined by being good at chess? I mean it can just about brute force the game; how is that intelligent? The Turing test is way older and seems to have been the standard measure since it's inception.
  - darkmighty 8y ago
    First of all you can't brute force the chess. Algorithms that beat high level chess players are non-trivial, even with todays computers. In fact top engines today all use carefully designed heuristics hand-crafted by experts -- this notion that Big Blue, Deep fritz, etc were dumb "brute force search engines" is a misleading tale. Second, in the 70s there was no computer power even for quite clever algorithms (that probably didn't exist yet) to beat top chess players. Chess was seen as a grand goal requiring utmost intelligence -- while it is obvious in hindsight, at the time the intuition was probably that extremely "intelligent" humans were required to play chess, and in fact the best chess players were among the most "intelligent" persons -- it was a clear exclusively intellectual task that few people were competent at. So many believed that chess would be one of the greatest challenges to AI (the clarity of the rules added convenience of research and implementation). Things like walking didn't seem intellectually demanding, so the common sense was that it is probably "easy". In fact today we know that navigating a bipedal robot in a simple environment through visual recognition is vastly more difficult computationally than playing chess well, it is only easier for us because we have highly specialized circuitry in our brain hat is well matched to those tasks. Our brain wetware is not very well matched to playing chess. Also chatbots have been doing pretty well on Turing's original definition of a Turing test, ever since about 10 years ago. But now it is being argued that Turing didn't really see the "loopholes" they believe the bots are exploiting, and are coming up with more strict requirements for a Turing test. That's totally in line with Tao's argument that every time we approach a major AI goal, suddenly it is not AI anymore, because there's nothing magical about it, just boring old technology. And human brains are magical, right? Until every obscure niche capability of humans has been dominated in every possible way by AIs many won't want to concede that it really is AI. And even when it does become better than us in every possible way, I suspect a few will still find arbitrary reasons why it really isn't AI/AGI, e.g. because it is not organic, because the computer lacks a body, because it lacks a "soul", etc.

nradov 8y ago

It's unfortunate that in 2018 we still have to resort to klugey work arounds like this with so many restaurants and hair salons instead of being able to make reservations online. There are services like OpenTable but even here in Silicon Valley only a small minority of restaurants use them. It seems like there's a huge opportunity if someone can crack the market.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to picking up the phone and talking to someone.
- philwelch 8y ago
  That's the universal criticism of every technology. "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to looking up directions to wherever they're driving before they get in the car." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to paying their bills every month." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to carrying cash around and counting change." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to coming over and talking in person." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to washing their dishes by hand." "I think it's more unfortunate that so many people are just so opposed to doing long division."
- shados 8y ago
  I don't mind talking to "someone". But I sure mind talking to customer service folks who have absolutely no interest in talking to me and make it as difficult as realistically possible. Worse, they're probably gonna spend 3/4th of the time trying to sell me shit I don't want and make me fight against it. Online, I can ignore any prompt and just click next next next finish, and the form won't be in a bad mood. I have no interest in talking to an annoyed clerk, and they obviously don't want to talk to me, so we can just avoid each other.
  - danShumway 8y ago

davemel37 8y ago

> 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. I think this perspective is very short sighted. You will lose customers to automation, but businesses wont turn away customers because of automation. Customers and prospects don't want to interact with machines, but businesses should be willing to give customers what they want. The idea that a tool can be rolled out to millions of consumers, even with limited use cases and not have to get adoption from businesses to be useful is IMHO a much bigger opportunity and much better use case than rolling out a tool to businesses that make the interaction less personal. Customers need to trust businesses, business only need to collect money from customers. I think everyone who focuses on chatbots from the business use case perspective is missing the bigger opportunity. A technology that can give a consumer access to ALL businesses, not just the ones who adopt a new technology offers much more utility than serving businesses or the shortsighted use cases like saving time and money for the business.

ZainRiz 8y ago
Uh...businesses have been automating phone calls for decades now
- davemel37 8y ago
  Thats partially my point. Everyone is thinking about the business case for cost saving around automation for businesses, but that lacks imagination. Automation tools for consumers to interact with humans at businesses is where the real opportunity lies. Would you ever voluntarily use an IVR? I wouldn't. If I am going to interact with automation for a business, I want to do it with a different interface than voice... all the hype around NLP and chatbots was uninspired and focused on the wrong side of the interaction... Building conversational interfaces for consumers to use to interact with businesses is a much better use case.

ZainRiz 8y ago

As crazy as it seems at first glance, a double Duplex system would be a really beneficial result. What stops businesses from setting up Apis from scheduling services today? It's the lack of a universal API. If a barber shop wants to make it possible for a 3rd party app to book appointments then they have to release some API. But that's not the end of it. The 3rd party app has to first discover their Api, someone has to understand it and write code to use it, and then deploy that code. I'll repeat for emphasis: This is mainly a problem today because there is no universal Api that all services can use With Duplex, verbals speech becomes a universal Api that every service can parse and communicate to each other with. Also, the discoverability is taken care of by using publicly cataloged phone numbers on services like Google Maps, Yelp, etc

TeMPOraL 8y ago
No, it doesn't. The problem of universal API is entirely orthogonal to voice communications. Duplex is not a Turnig-complete system, it's just an API behind a voice recognition layer. All the important problems for universal APIs happen after that layer. Ultimately, what you describe can work perfectly only when everyone is using Duplex, which is equivalent to everyone using Google-defined API. That's not universal, because you have one entity behind it. The only way this brings us somewhat closer to universal API is that if you expect it to handle humans as well, it introduces some constraints to the space of possible APIs, which could make it easier for everyone to agree on a common format. Constraints of natural language processing without a human-level AI require your API to be very fuzzy and very lenient. There's nothing stopping one from implementing those same constraints over a text or binary protocol. Nothing except no reason for businesses to do it.
- ZainRiz 8y ago
  Everyone doesn't have to use Duplex, everyone would have to use a system that allows it to seem like a human is talking to the other person, provided you limit the context to a particular domain (like taking reservations). This system could be developed by any company with sufficiently advanced ML chops

luckydata 8y ago

You gotta be kidding. If it was that easy why didn't you build it yourself? Easy billion right there.

icebraining 8y ago
cromwellan didn't say it was easy. It's still hard to do something limited.
rpeden 8y ago
Well, cromwellian works at Google, so maybe he did build it himself. :)

andrepd 8y ago

>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. Is this satire? If this is indeed the future, I wonder if there is an irresistible urge to make systems as inefficient as possible. Kind of "like gases expand to fill the container, applications become as inefficient as the power of the hardware allows".

cma 8y ago

You have to see it in use too. The Milo demo from Microsoft was much more impressive, but completely fake.

hkmurakami 8y ago

I imagined both the booker and bookee using a call automater / reception automater to make the appointment in the future.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

> Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls And those will have online booking systems already - I don't see how this technology is still relevant nowadays. Maybe it was back in the 90's when the internet (and online booking) was a new thing, but now? I can't see there's a big market for this application.

b34r 8y ago

It’s the lack of indication that you’re talking to an automated assistant and that fact that it uses human affectations in its speech that creeps me out hardcore.

nickbauman 8y ago

Small business do have email. I use email to do this kind of thing all the time and it works extremely well. I feel like this is a case of silicon valley solving marginal problems while the world burns.

utopcell 8y ago

To the extend that the primary application for this is call support, I don't agree with your proposal. This is supposed to close the gap between a tech-savvy group that would be using duplex and tech-handicapped small businesses. It is much easier / effective for a restaurant for example to hook up with open table than deploy something like business-duplex.

lorenzorhoades 8y ago
Exactly. If a small business doesn't use open table or duplex, no problem - I can just use duplex to schedule the reservation for me. Open table requires buy in from the restaurant, duplex doesn't.

vertexFarm 8y ago

I feel like a lot of people who are pointing out the limitations show a failure in imagination of where this will go in the future. I don't care about the obscure technical limitations now, those are just engineering problems that will be solved in very short time. I'm not afraid of the machines going all singularity or skynet or whatever, becoming sentient and taking over the world as some kind of robo-Hitler. That's moronic. But what does worry me is the normalization of having a machine do everything for you, plan your whole life, access every little detail of every bit of your personal data and lifestyle. Of course we've already had that for a while with the way phones work. But this is another step towards getting public consensus for using it in new ways. Once people are used to this, we'll have more and more systems with conversational software that manages your life for you. Speaks on your behalf. Interfaces with the world for you because doing it yourself is far too stressful and inconvenient. And of course it'll be a free, advertising-supported model so all that data will have to be shared with, among many things, shady political organizations to try to gain every little advantage possible to manipulate public opinion and steer themselves into enormous power. Think of where the cell phone started off: just a phone in your pocket. It's so much more now. Remember that when thinking about these AI assistants and what they will develop into. I'm not afraid of the classical AI apocalypse. I'm afraid that these systems will do exactly what they're designed to do. That people are underestimating just how much power lies in these little inconveniences in life, once they're all added up and analyzed and tallied.

sheeshkebab 8y ago

Umm...hmm...I got you.

amrx101 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. A colleague of mine is just going on about this.

susanhi 8y ago

You’re only looking at what it is today. You just need to extrapolate enough into the future to see how deeply disturbing this really is.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

The Turing Test is irrelevant, the "dystopian" stuff is mostly irrelevant, the ethics are highly relevant. It is simply unethical for a computer to converse with a human while misleading them into believing they are talking to a human. There are a zillion reasons why this is so, if none of them seem obvious then I'd suggest investing some time to take an ethics course.