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This tech might work well dealing with Emergency Service calls, to filter out inappropriate calls and only pass on genuine emergencies to the human operator rel

This tech might work well dealing with Emergency Service calls, to filter out inappropriate calls and only pass on genuine emergencies to the human operator related the required service.

amelius 8y ago
What if there are false positives?
dpwm 8y ago
That would be fairly neat, although I think there might be some problems. Who is to blame when a voice assistant fails to pass on the call when somebody speaks with the wrong accent? On the other hand, I imagine a system where you could speak in your native language and have the report passed on as a transcript may also save lives.
arcticfox 8y ago
This sounds like the worst situation to use it in, unless it's actually better at English than humans. Even if 99/100 emergency calls are garbage, you want the best responder on the line immediately for the one call that might save lives. And if it decides to hang up on an actual emergency? That would be a special kind of fail.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  I imagine it won't just hang up, it will solve the call just like a human would, but since it's trivial, it can be automated. Any case that the bot doesn't 100% surely know how to solve -> call is forwarded.
- jmcnulty 8y ago
  I guess it depends on whether Google think it would be up to the job. If so then it would need to under go a lengthy trial for the Services to establish a suitable level of confidence. Emergency service calls are recorded, so there's plenty of real world data to test and tune with. And for a live trial I'd have real people shadowing Duplex; listening in and ready to take over if the call doesn't go in the right direction.
speedplane 8y ago
If I had to pick a single area of phone calls that I would not want automated, it would be 911 calls. Any potential delay or misunderstanding could result in a horrible result. There's no question that humans could make similar errors, but they can be held accountable in ways a computer could not.
tialaramex 8y ago
Emergency call takers are trained to detect callers who are unable for some reason to clearly express the emergency and therefore can only have a mundane conversation and maybe say where they are. They also deal with calls initiated by small children who don't understand what's going on beyond that they were told at some point to dial 9-1-1 (or 1-1-2 or whatever the local equivalent is) if anything bad happens. "Mummy won't wake up" is a common complaint which can signify anything from a drug overdose, homicide, through carbon monoxide poisoning, animal attack... It would only make sense to filter out non-emergencies if you're able to achieve an _extremely_ low rate of rejecting true emergencies and your cost to service false alerts is high. For example the analogue COSPAS SARSAT system was phased out because it had more than 99% false alerts and servicing an emergency typically means dispatching helicopters and/or coast guard vessels to a distant location. False alerts (now often caused by human error, ie typically somebody did press the button but they didn't mean to or they hadn't appreciated that "I'm bored" isn't an emergency) remain a majority of all COSPAS SARSAT alerts with the digital system, but at least it's not 99% any more.

This tech might work well dealing with Emergency Service calls, to filter out inappropriate calls and only pass on genuine emergencies to the human operator related the required service.

amelius 8y ago

What if there are false positives?

dpwm 8y ago

That would be fairly neat, although I think there might be some problems. Who is to blame when a voice assistant fails to pass on the call when somebody speaks with the wrong accent? On the other hand, I imagine a system where you could speak in your native language and have the report passed on as a transcript may also save lives.

arcticfox 8y ago

This sounds like the worst situation to use it in, unless it's actually better at English than humans. Even if 99/100 emergency calls are garbage, you want the best responder on the line immediately for the one call that might save lives. And if it decides to hang up on an actual emergency? That would be a special kind of fail.

TomMarius 8y ago
I imagine it won't just hang up, it will solve the call just like a human would, but since it's trivial, it can be automated. Any case that the bot doesn't 100% surely know how to solve -> call is forwarded.
jmcnulty 8y ago
I guess it depends on whether Google think it would be up to the job. If so then it would need to under go a lengthy trial for the Services to establish a suitable level of confidence. Emergency service calls are recorded, so there's plenty of real world data to test and tune with. And for a live trial I'd have real people shadowing Duplex; listening in and ready to take over if the call doesn't go in the right direction.

speedplane 8y ago

If I had to pick a single area of phone calls that I would not want automated, it would be 911 calls. Any potential delay or misunderstanding could result in a horrible result. There's no question that humans could make similar errors, but they can be held accountable in ways a computer could not.

tialaramex 8y ago

Emergency call takers are trained to detect callers who are unable for some reason to clearly express the emergency and therefore can only have a mundane conversation and maybe say where they are. They also deal with calls initiated by small children who don't understand what's going on beyond that they were told at some point to dial 9-1-1 (or 1-1-2 or whatever the local equivalent is) if anything bad happens. "Mummy won't wake up" is a common complaint which can signify anything from a drug overdose, homicide, through carbon monoxide poisoning, animal attack... It would only make sense to filter out non-emergencies if you're able to achieve an _extremely_ low rate of rejecting true emergencies and your cost to service false alerts is high. For example the analogue COSPAS SARSAT system was phased out because it had more than 99% false alerts and servicing an emergency typically means dispatching helicopters and/or coast guard vessels to a distant location. False alerts (now often caused by human error, ie typically somebody did press the button but they didn't mean to or they hadn't appreciated that "I'm bored" isn't an emergency) remain a majority of all COSPAS SARSAT alerts with the digital system, but at least it's not 99% any more.