10 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoThis 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 agoA 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 agoLol 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-
- ChristianGeek 8y agoPotentially there would be a way for both sides to recognize that the other side is a machine and they could switch to binary communication.
- dannyw 8y agoBinary communication isn't useful by itself. You need a compatible protocol and API. I can give you 010101010101101011111 to a machine all I want, if they don't know how it's formatted, it's useless. Conversational English is a format.
- cezart 8y agoWell they could at least continue doing the same thing, at 100x the speed.
- scrollaway 8y agoOver the phone? Voice recognition would fail even more. Google also mentioned some of the latency in answering is required by their processing.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoDoes this sound look familiar? ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c In other words, if M2M handshake works, switch away from voice.
- dmihal 8y agoThe simplest "API" would be skipping the text-to-speech-to-text process, and send the text string in binary.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> Conversational English is a format. And as you said, format isn't enough. You need semantics. If two applications know enough about the other side to know how to formulate their voice queries, they know at least enough to exchange those same queries as text, and skip the stupidly wasteful text->speech->text process. (And if world wouldn't be so full of adversarial practices driving engineering stupidity, the developers would agree on an efficient binary format beforehand.)
- redavni 8y agoThe person who invents a way to change the little green phone icon with a little human icon for when they want to talk to a human will be a zillionaire. But that is the far future. Realistically, I just don't see this as feasible any time soon.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tomludus 8y agoThis really made me laugh. You are also totally right, we have better solutions to this problem already.
- Tracist 8y agoThere are already apps/technologies that transmit information through audio at frequencies not audible to humans. It should be trivial to adapt this so that if two AI systems are interacting they can perform an "AI-handshake" in the audio at the start and then switch to a more efficient form of communication.
- blt 8y agobut audio telephony equipment generally assumes the signal is in the human vocal range, right?
- NLips 8y agoCorrect. There are several levels at which this applies: Phone hardware (microphones, speakers) are only calibrated to detect 'useful' frequencies for human speech. The sampling rate used by audio codecs tend to cut off _before_ the human ear's limits e.g. at 8kHz or 16kHz. They aren't even trying to reproduce everything the ear can detect; just human speech to decent quality. Codecs are optimized to make human speech inteligible. The person listening to you on the phone isn't receiving a complete waveform for the recorded frequency range. The signal has been compressed to reduce the bandwidth required, where the goal isn't e.g. lossless compression; it's decent quality speech after decompression. It's completely possible to play tones alongside speech that we won't notice, but in the general case, not tones that the human ear can't detect.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ZainRiz 8y agoLol, but if you think about it, what stops businesses from doing this 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. This is 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 wtih. Also, the discoverability is taken care of by using publicly cataloged phone numbers on services like Google Maps, Yelp, etc
- madrox 8y agoEnglish, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild
- WhiteNoiz3 8y agoIf you think about it, conversation is just a loosely defined API with an extremely high degree of tolerance for poorly formed input.
- jamesmiller5 8y agoI mean we are all just emotional processing silos that trade information and process it right :) ?
- hestefisk 8y agoThat’s a very Wittgensteinian view.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoThis thread now contains a loop. Granted, it's a really long loop, all the way back to 1956, but it's a loop all right: you've essentially summarized the Dartmouth Conference and its assumption "gee, that ought be just a minor research subject - easy, right?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#Dartmouth_Conference_1956:_the_birth_of_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
- zbentley 8y ago...somewhere, Kevin Mitnick just smiled. I like to think it was a smile of renewed relevance due to unbelievably poor technical decisions.
- nielsbot 8y agoGoogle Duplex is just a backwards compatibility shim...
- Piskvorrr 8y agoBackwards compatibility is not bad, quite the opposite. There are far too many dead data silos, abandoned for a new, shiny and incompatible protocol.
- real-hacker 8y agoThat form of communication exists. It's called REST.
- douglaswlance 8y agoThe issue here is interfacing with ancient telephone systems. If the two bots were to slip in some subliminal beeps and boops to recognize each other; then they could change their speech to very quick binary communication.
- i386 8y agoYou mean AT codes.. sounds familiar
- nomy99 8y agoyou mean the entire tcp stack and network to network communication?
- digi_owl 8y agoI can already hear the modem handshake playing in my head...
- josefx 8y agoYou can't just drop compatibility. We will have A.I. trained voice systems that mimic natural speech just enough to be understood by duplex while compressing the exchange to a minimum. Data transfer will be measured in microwords per second. Future versions of duplex will of course detect this kind of compressed speech and reply in kind, falling back to normal speech only if the immediate response is similar to north american confusion.