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A closer look at Google Duplex

222 points by Ours90 8y ago

cecja 8y ago
Don't get me wrong I like the tech but I don't get the sentiment. It is just a gimmick or a bridge technology. In the end our phones should be able to talk to the booking system and make the reservation without human interaction. I think the resources could be better allocated, I guess it's just a show and tell kinda project for google but the novelty wears of really fast after the first wrong reservation.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  No man. Nobody cares about the booking of reservations. This is about AIs having useful conversations with people. Start with a very limited context and goal, and grow out from there.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Everything in life is a "stopgap". In an ideal world we wouldn't need to make reservations at all, our phones would just sense that we were heading toward a restaurant and would work directly with people there to ensure we have a table and our food is ready and paid for by the time we get there. But we don't live in an ideal world, and making a "perfect" system that nobody uses is useless. This is a solution that real people can take advantage of right now for many places that don't have the budget or time to integrate with every service out there. It's an real solution to a real problem, and I don't think calling it "show and tell" is fair just because you can think of a "technically better" solution in 5 minutes that you'll never be able to roll out to 90%+ of stores and services out there. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"
  - scarface74 8y ago
    No the good would be Google hosting a free booking software as a service system and an app or even Google Assistant to interact with the system. I'm sure companies would jump at the opportunity. Google gets more information about people's habits and it the success rate would be a lot higher. "Don't let overly complicated be the enemy of the simple"....
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      Which they can still do! And are in a way (they also showed integrations with assistant and APIs at the same time as showing Duplex). But that assumes that businesses have the time to integrate, that they care to integrate, and that they can repeat the process for every proprietary API and service out there. That requires a fulltime developer or another service that does the integration for them. Which again isn't a problem for a lot of businesses, they might be more than happy to do that, but we won't ever hit 100% coverage with those services, especially not across all the "smart assistants" out there. This allows users to work with almost 100% of businesses right now, and businesses can further integrate without duplex if needed/wanted and the user will not have to care what system the business uses, or how it integrates.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        But that assumes that businesses have the time to integrate, that they care to integrate, and that they can repeat the process for every proprietary API and service out there. Google is the 800 pound gorilla. Companies would integrate with them if they don't want to be left out. This allows users to work with almost 100% of businesses right now, You're assuming that it will be good enough and that the businesses won't hang up on it like people do with every other spam automated system.
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      And this runs head long into competitive issues. Google says they'll integrate the Google Assistant with OpenTable to let you book tables, but what's the chance OpenTable would nix that integration if Google was trying to make a free competitor? Google doesn't want to be in the restaurant booking system business, and this let's them offer a service in their assistant that no one else can.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Companies already go out of their way to place nice with Google (AMP pages). OpenTable really wouldn't have a choice. By being the default, Google has a competitive advantage. Google doesn't want to be in the restaurant booking system business Google wants to be in every business where they can gather data to better target advertising.
- 51Cards 8y ago
  Your comment misses the critical point though... this hits all the places that have no electronic booking systems. To those here that concept probably seems absurd because we're technically oriented. My barber, doctor, mechanic and favorite BBQ joint however still take phone calls to make appointments and you can talk to them about electronic scheduling till you're blue in the face, they have no desire to change. The goal of this technology is to bridge the gap... start thinking machine to human interaction where machine to machine isn't available. Not to mention the language barriers. Think of a person still struggling with a language needing to make an appointment in that language. I can see an interface on this where you would select the location and time and have Assistant call them in the appropriate language to handle the exchange for you. No longer is that local pasta place out of my reach when I'm in Italy but can't speak Italian. This opens up a huge realm of possibilities.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    this hits all the places that have no electronic booking systems. To those here that concept probably seems absurd because we're technically oriented. My barber, doctor, mechanic and favorite BBQ joint however still take phone calls to make appointments and you can talk to them about electronic scheduling till you're blue in the face, they have no desire to change. Sure they will change, my barber uses stripe, my doctor does everything else on computer - he's over 60 and three weeks away from retirement, my mechanic has to be technical to operate on modern cars and uses computers for estimates, sending pictures to insurance agents, etc.
    - 51Cards 8y ago
      At what point in our industry have we ever said "Let's stop innovating and making things easier, we've come far enough, now the people have to adapt to us." Natural language processing and conversation is the next step right now... to me this is such a logical progression I'll be shocked if it's not being planned by many teams.
      - scarface74 8y ago
- ttul 8y ago
  Booking appointments is one of those areas that suffers terribly from a lack of network effects. Since it is so easy to create a new booking system, there are millions of different ones - your dentist probably uses a way different system from your doctor, for instance, never mind another dentist. Because it’s easy to create a booking system, making a translation layer between systems is hard. There is no natural incentive for these booking systems to standardize, because each has its constituent users, and none of them are complaining. So, for now, and probably for a long time to come, booking will be done by humans.
  - ttul 8y ago
    ... clarification: by humans I mean the receptionists, not the Google Duplex.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Booking appointments is one of those areas that suffers terribly from a lack of network effects. Since it is so easy to create a new booking system, there are millions of different ones - your dentist probably uses a way different system from your doctor, for instance, never mind another dentist. Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices. Then imagine them giving away cheap tablets to run it on....
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      >Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices. Very little. The overwhelming majority of businesses won't switch their booking system unless they have a truly compelling reason. A large proportion of small businesses still use pen-and-paper to manage their bookings and have no intention of changing. There is still a non-trivial market for dot-matrix printers and NCR paper. Many national retail chains use terminal emulators for their Point of Sale systems. For perfectly understandable reasons, businesses tend to be very conservative about their technology choices. Their current solution might not be perfect, but they know that it works, for a value of "works" that is compatible with their business remaining profitable. They know from experience that new technologies are often more trouble than they're worth.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  The world is full of stop-gap technologies, because switching is hard and expensive. I have a PNG of my signature and a PDF-to-fax service, because I sometimes need to interface with legacy systems. I still have a checkbook, which I use once or twice a year. I have a full set of metric and SAE wrenches. Hell, I've still got some RS-232 cables. Duplex is an adapter, a shim, an abstraction layer. It's not perfect, but it solves a problem.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I don't fully disagree, but you have to realize that there are a great number of people and places that are not hooked up to the internet, due to geography, politics, history, or other reasons. Some of the best restaurants, hotels, and other experiences in the world are not reachable via an online reservation system. The place I stayed last weekend can only be reserved by phone. Not because the owners luddites, but to keep out the bargain hunting riff-raff. There was a piece on CBS News a few weeks ago about a restaurant in Maine that's so popular you can only make a reservation by mail. Sure hotels.com and opentable.com may nail the 80% of what's popular to the kinds of people who go to those sorts of places. But this world is so much bigger and more interesting than the internet or even Google can imagine. For me the killed Duplex app will be when it's able to make a reservation for me in a language I don't speak. But even though its lost the "beta" badge, Google Translate still isn't ready for primetime.[0] [0] I say this based on the feedback from the professional translators I work with daily. I put Google Translate text in my work as placeholders, and they have to then re-translate the projects correctly before they can be published.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Would raising the prices be enough to weed out the barfain hunting riff raff? That phone only model just sounds like an excise or a bias against young people who tend to use computers more
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      Would raising the prices be enough to weed out the barfain hunting riff raff? With airline miles, hotels.com free night promotions, etc... probably not. People who want something for nothing will try anything.
- csomar 8y ago
  I don't think this is about automated bookings. This is about Google advancing AI.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  Google Duplex is not really about restaurant reservations. AlphaGo is not really about winning at the game of Go. They're both about something else. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
- darkerside 8y ago
  With this attitude, messy and outdated protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP would be shelved in favor of clean and efficient theoretical protocols that transcend the foolish bonds of our existing infrastructure. i.e. No Internet
- megy 8y ago
  This is huge step. No longer does a computer need an API to communicate with someone.
dqv 8y ago
> For instance, asked to “repeat the last four numbers,” it restates the phone number in its entirety. It’s not a flaw, exactly, but it does show a simple place where the system is pushed to its limitations with regard to the understanding of the the subtle nuances of human conversation. I chuckled. From experience, it turns out some humans don't understand the subtle nuances of human conversation either.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- empath75 8y ago
  I repeat the whole number when people ask me to repeat part of it all the time.
- kevincox 8y ago
  It's not that I don't understand, but I am unable to say the last four digits of my number without saying the whole thing (or at least saying the leading digits in my head). This is just how my brain recalls it.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  Heh, I agree that is rather a stretch. There is no harm in repeating the whole thing. And if they misheard the "last 4" there is a chance they misheard the first few as well.
mooneater 8y ago
Duplex is likely built with deep reinforcement learning, though i have not seen that disclosed yet.
microcolonel 8y ago
I think the refinement of saying "this is the google assistant" at the beginning is positive. Seems to solve the supposed ethical issues of the previous iteration.
turdnagel 8y ago
I believe some of the questions around Duplex were not whether or not the recordings were "real," but whether or not they were edited. The article was not clear on this...
- ehsankia 8y ago
  From my understanding reading the article, the journalist that were they each got to try out the system themselves. While they don't provide exact audio, I assume they would've pointed out if what they experienced was wildly different. Their description of the conversation sounds a lot like what we had heard.
ragazzina 8y ago
>“We want to make sure that we’re not wasting the business’s time,” Fox says. “We want to make sure throughout everything we do here, that this is good experience for the business and that they’re not getting frustrated talking to an assistant while they’re trying to run their business.” What's the added value of sounding exactly like a real person then? Why can't it be a robotic voice following a simple, efficient algorithm? - Hi. I'm a robot trying to book for 4 at 20 tonight for my client. Is it possible? Please say Yes or No - Wait what? - I'm a robot trying to book for 4 at 20 tonight for my client. Is it possible? Please say Yes or No - No - Is it possible at any other time tonight? If yes, when? - Yes, at 21 - I would like to book for 4 at 21. Thank you. We have had this kind of technology for years.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  That would be wasting time, because humans are used to talking to humans, not to robots. Do you enjoy it when you call a business and you have to sit through the annoying automated system? If you want to make the experience better for businesses, this is the way to go, although much harder to achieve. The "um"s aren't to trick the person, it's actually makes the conversation flow better.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Because people will hang up on it like they do all other robocalls, or they will talk to it like many people talk to "computers". They won't use grammar, they will speak louder, they will slow down, and they will try to keep the conversation as simple as possible fearing that the system can't handle anything else. It needs to sound human so that humans will interact with it correctly. If it sounds human, then the person on the other end of the call might say things like "We don't have anything available on the 3rd but we do on the 5th, is that okay?" If it sounds like a robot, people will just respond to questions with "no", "yes", or say "phone number" instead of "can i have your phone number?" Sounding human puts the human in the drivers seat, sounding robotic means the "robot" needs to drive the conversation.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    or they will talk to it like many people talk to "computers". They won't use grammar, they will speak louder, they will slow down, and they will try to keep the conversation as simple as possible fearing that the system can't handle anything else So, pretty much how we've trained ourselves to use Google, the search engine. Nobody types "I'd like to know what the best way is to braise pork with white wine" into Google. They type "pork recipe braise wine" because we've been trained by Google that this will produce better results. If Google's current search worked as well as it claims Duplex will, then we'd finally be getting somewhere. But Google's taken its eye off the ball. Right now, at least for the things I search for, searching on Google is like playing an Infocom game.
golfer 8y ago
The Ars Technica writeup is superior, IMHO: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-calling-we-talk-to-the-revolutionary-but-limited-phone-ai/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-cal...
- Omnus 8y ago
  It "feels revolutionary" to the author, but it is literally only capable of handling the simplest restaurant and hair salon reservations (the kind of thing you could do yourself in about 90 seconds). Seems like a silly headline, although the details are interesting.
  - bitpush 8y ago
    Its all simple in retrospect. The classic case, obviously, is Dropbox where HN dismissed it as 'its just rsync. What's the big deal'.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      At the end of the day, Dropbox is becoming more of a feature than a product as Steve Jobs said. For the $9.99 a month that Dropbox costs for a terabyte, you can get Office 365 that includes One Drive for 1Tb each for up to 5 users.
  - Jyaif 8y ago
    It must feel at least a little bit revolutionary since half the internet was saying that the demo was faked.
    - adtac 8y ago
      Probably the best compliment Google could get.
    - Omnus 8y ago
      People were fooled by hype, a usual occurrence with new "AI" technology. That says nothing about how "revolutionary" it is.
finolex1 8y ago
I'm curious how Google envisions the future of this technology. Will it be limited to specific, Google defined use cases such as making reservations, or will it be a versatile platform allowing developers to create various agents, much like Dialogflow?
jasonjei 8y ago
I wonder how Duplex would work if it rings a line powered by Duplex (for example, a business uses Duplex to schedule bookings). Would it just talk to the backend, or would Duplex talk to the receiving Duplex in the normal scheduling chat dance?
dmitriid 8y ago
> Duplex represents a rare early look into an ongoing project from a company notorious for playing it close to the vest. Wat. Google is notorious for announcing dozens of projects only to cancel/downplay them a year, a year and a half later. Their I/O keynotes are usually replete with "awesome product, will be released some undefined time in the future" (many of those never materialise, or take on new forms).
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Right, this is basically inevitable if you're willing to try new things (and announce them significantly ahead of a public launch). You're never gonna be 100% accurate with guessing which potential products will turn out to be viable products.
- bitpush 8y ago
  2 ways to look at this, although I assume you know both these already. 1. Experimentation is key, and a willingness to accept mistakes and move on. If all a company does is play to its strength, you'd miss disruptive technologies. Some of these experiments work, some dont. 2. Pursuing an idea without a viable business opportunity is suicide. The idea might be "cool" and "well received" but if it cant sustain in the long-run, it doesn't serve anyone.
skywhopper 8y ago
"Thep Thai’s owner insists that such a service would be something of a godsend for the 100-plus reservations the restaurant fields on a daily basis." I'm a little confused by this and it never seems to be explained. How does this system make the restaurant's job easier?
- strictnein 8y ago
  Two possibilities: 1. She wants it to answer the calls 2. The average person, when told "6pm on Tuesday is not available" probably either spends a bunch of time on the phone looking for another open spot on their calendar, or just calls back later.
  - geekamongus 8y ago
    Third possibility: Google is pushing this narrative because Step Two of their Duplex scheme is to automate the receiving end as well. No need for any human interaction that way.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      So two standard APIs talking to each other or the person calling to make the reservation knows they are talking to a computer with limited domain understanding and speaks accordingly and the backend calls an API -- like programming an Alexa skill....
    - 0xakhil 8y ago
      This doesn't make sense. They should just use an API. Why bother speaking like human when it is a bot at the other end!! :D
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Duplex doesn't solve #2
- cbolton 8y ago
  I would guess many of these 100-plus reservations don't go smoothly. Callers might not speek English so well, or they might call amidst street noise, hesitate on their wishes... It's plausible that a standardized call format from the Google Assistant would be easier for the employees and take less time?
jlebar 8y ago
So is Gruber eating his hat yet? https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/05/11/duplex-skepticism https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/05/11/duplex-skeptici... https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425
- bitpush 8y ago
  Considering that he went out of his way to express his opinion (calling it a "fraud" and "con"), it'd be funny if he sits this one out.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    He didn't, though. He said the terms of the demo made it seem like one
    - tacomonstrous 8y ago
      He said he thought Pichai was lying: >Pichai claims these two examples are actual phone calls to actual businesses. I’m saying I don’t think that’s true. I'm not sure what distinction you're making.
      - AlexCoventry 8y ago
        Ok, that's a firmer commitment than he made in the blog post.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  I think his skepticism was warranted. It bothered me as well, that the demonstration was so controlled.
  - jlebar 8y ago
    > >Pichai claims these two examples are actual phone calls to actual businesses. I’m saying I don’t think that’s true. Skepticism and calling someone a liar aren't the same thing...
lowlevel 8y ago
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it should be done. Google needs some non-engineers.
Itsdijital 8y ago
Guys, c'mon, Google didn't make Duplex so that it could revolutionize restaurant reservations. Everyone here is getting so hung up on how there are better/other/existing ways to book a table. Of course there are, but that's clearly not the point of Duplex. Reservations are just a convenient test bed for the underlying technology. And the underlying tech is 100% the reason for Duplex. Not table booking. It's all about training for AI - speech generation, conversation, language parsing. Making a reservation is a quarter step up and long staircase google sees for this tech.
- notatoad 8y ago
  i don't know what end goal you think they're training for, but duplex feels enough like an end goal to me. I know everybody likes to say everything google does is all about training the AI, but they have to be training for something. This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work. making a reservation is the beginning of a sale. being able to book a reservation at any arbitrary restaurant with no extra work on the restaurantuer's part makes google ads more valuable. They can make money off this quite directly.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bjartr 8y ago
    Google 411 could have been considered an end goal too. It too was concrete and monetizeable. Instead it was actually a way to get a whole lot of natural language voice samples. When it stopped being useful in that regard, they didn't turn around and try to monetize it, they just killed it.
  - giobox 8y ago
    > This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work... They can make money off this quite directly. The interviews I've read point to an 80% success rate - hugely impressive, but 20% of interactions requiring human intervention is still a _very_ large, expensive staff hungry contact center to run when you are Google scale, for a product that ultimately doesn't really bring in any direct revenue. Each time Duplex fails in its current form, a human operator has to step in to finish the call. Even Google are telling us not to expect this to ship in anything anytime soon. From Ron at Ars' demo: “We’re actually quite a long way from launch, that’s the key thing to understand,” Fox explained at the meeting. “This is super-early technology, somewhere between technology demo and product.”
Animats 8y ago
Google says that, in testing, the system has also gotten tripped up encountering another machine by way of a phone tree. Listening closely because our menu options have changed doesn’t appear to compute just yet. An assistant which deals with a response tree, handles hold time, and gets to the point where there's a human at the other end and they've been given whatever numbers and addresses are appropriate would be useful. Before the humans talk, the automated assistants on both sides should have all the routine stuff out of the way.
- froindt 8y ago
  > Before the humans talk, the automated assistants on both sides should have all the routine stuff out of the way. Imagine if there wasn't quite enough security built into all of this. Store-bot: To confirm identity, what is users full name? Phone-tree-bot: Thomas Arnold Pellington Store-bot: What is Thomas Arnold Pellington's address? Phone-tree-bot: 186 North 15th Street Minneapolis, Minnesota Store-bot: What is Thomas Arnold Pellington's Social Security Number? Phone-tree-bot: 183-44-5975 Now what if Phone-tree-bot called the wrong store number? I remember a case awhile back where someone changed the phone number to the FBI or CIA was changed on Google Maps. IIRC, they forwarded the calls to the correct number, but could have just as easily intercepted the communications. A human has a chance of noticing that "the person on the other end is asking some weird questions that make me feel uneasy, maybe I should hang up". Hopefully bots could develop the same ability? Having a centralized source of phone trees for all the cable, cell phone, and service providers would certainly help.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    > Imagine if there wasn't quite enough security built into all of this. Fortunately, it seems that security was a consideration. From the Ars Technica article: At one point, the callers' email was asked for and Duplex responded with "I'm afraid I don't have permission to share my client's email."
  - eduren 8y ago
    I'm just imagining how to secure that in a voice only system: Phone-bot: To confirm store identity please sign phrase with store private key. Store-bot: One second Store-bot: Data 5 7 4 9 a c e 7 f 6 d 0 0 2..... Phone-bot: Identity confirmed to match Store public key ... sensitive convo ... Of course it's ridiculous, but I got a chuckle
imh 8y ago
> While the disclosures weren’t there in the earliest stage, the company has said since the beginning that it intended to add them. > In my test call, I attempt to get Google Assistant to repeat that bit — it’s easy enough to not hear that opening line, particularly when you’ve got the phone up to your ear inside a crowded restaurant. But the AI just barrels on with the reservation. If you miss the disclosure, you’re out of luck — for now, at least. At present, the only way to opt out of being recorded is to just hang up the phone — not the best way to get repeat visitors. This part makes me deeply uncomfortable. Opting out of being recorded likely means being fired for not taking its reservations. Consent feels weirdly coercive. For a tiny improvement in someone else's convenience, we may end up inching even closer to everything being recorded.
rukittenme 8y ago
Off topic: to all the UI/UX designers out there, I instinctively click all prominent "X" symbols on a page before trying to determine what they mean. Every time I visit tech crunch I end up clicking the X and then hitting the back button to bring the article back up. A "Done" button would be better. Non-modal article content would be best...
TimMurnaghan 8y ago
What about the question of no-shows? If your assistant can make bookings easily - you can make a load and then choose where you actually go later. That's actually one reason why restaurants like phone booking - because if you've had the human interaction of talking you're less likely to not show up. The likely upshot is that the industry will have to move to paying for bookings.
jacobsenscott 8y ago
The article says "Eight percent is pretty good.." Actually, 80% success is unusable. I expect that is fairly close the the ceiling. If they really do roll this out (spoiler, they won't) google will need an army of humans to handle the other 20%. I guess I don't mind google paying a human to be my personal assistant, but I don't know if google will like it. I hope the human assistants are not randomly selected, but weighted to select the same human you've used before. This will give the illusion that you really have your own personal assistant.
dillondoyle 8y ago
Interesting 'the next round will find Assistant inquiring about business hours.' Probably a really valuable addition to Google Search Results, if they can use phones to verify open hours of businesses without having to pay people to make the calls (and without annoyance of older tech IVRs). Google search and maps in particular are so great because of all these sources of data that come together to give me actionable info.
codeisawesome 8y ago
Even the Google AI finds it frustrating to deal with automated IVR according to this article. That concept needs to get an award for one of the most awful UX to ever exist - to say nothing about its (mis)use in phone numbers that could field emergencies.
arbie 8y ago
"The wait time at REQUESTED_RESTAURANT could be longer than usual, would you want to try GOOGLE_DUPLEX_PARTNER, instead? I already have a tentative booking on hold."
asafira 8y ago
There are a lot of vehement responses here --- with such strong naysayers, maybe they (Google) are setting themselves up for something that really pushes the boundary of what's possible and people are actually quite excited. =) I'm personally just excited to see where this goes. Either it will never live up to expectations (i.e., good enough for people to reliably use), it will take far longer than everyone things, or we'll see it soon!
headsoup 8y ago
I get the idea of wanting to provide voiced communications for those that it may be difficult for (or for translation), but I still cannot rationalise why it needs to sound 'just like a real person.' Would the initiator feel silly if a service called for them and sounded robotic, rather than like a friend? Why does it need to distinctly act human? I cannot see the specific requirement for this imitation, other than it's cool/creepy. Or it's just tech marching on to deliver sci-fi dreams.
Mikho 8y ago
Clever for Google to offer a tool to collect even more data about users and businesses. The Duplex is a golden trove to get data about orders and context -- the part that Google missed when people order just over a phone. Now Google could be all over the conversation and collect every bit of business activity and user data.
youkick 8y ago
Ethics aside, Duplex was built to overcome one key constraint: Restaurants are technology laggards. Yes, booking a reservation with few taps IS easier/more accurate, etc, but that requires restaurants to pay/integrate with those systems. With Duplex, you can schedule a reservation at ~100% of restaurants, right now, for free.

222 points by Ours90 8y ago

Don't get me wrong I like the tech but I don't get the sentiment. It is just a gimmick or a bridge technology. In the end our phones should be able to talk to the booking system and make the reservation without human interaction. I think the resources could be better allocated, I guess it's just a show and tell kinda project for google but the novelty wears of really fast after the first wrong reservation.

lallysingh 8y ago
No man. Nobody cares about the booking of reservations. This is about AIs having useful conversations with people. Start with a very limited context and goal, and grow out from there.
Klathmon 8y ago
Everything in life is a "stopgap". In an ideal world we wouldn't need to make reservations at all, our phones would just sense that we were heading toward a restaurant and would work directly with people there to ensure we have a table and our food is ready and paid for by the time we get there. But we don't live in an ideal world, and making a "perfect" system that nobody uses is useless. This is a solution that real people can take advantage of right now for many places that don't have the budget or time to integrate with every service out there. It's an real solution to a real problem, and I don't think calling it "show and tell" is fair just because you can think of a "technically better" solution in 5 minutes that you'll never be able to roll out to 90%+ of stores and services out there. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"
- scarface74 8y ago
  No the good would be Google hosting a free booking software as a service system and an app or even Google Assistant to interact with the system. I'm sure companies would jump at the opportunity. Google gets more information about people's habits and it the success rate would be a lot higher. "Don't let overly complicated be the enemy of the simple"....
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    Which they can still do! And are in a way (they also showed integrations with assistant and APIs at the same time as showing Duplex). But that assumes that businesses have the time to integrate, that they care to integrate, and that they can repeat the process for every proprietary API and service out there. That requires a fulltime developer or another service that does the integration for them. Which again isn't a problem for a lot of businesses, they might be more than happy to do that, but we won't ever hit 100% coverage with those services, especially not across all the "smart assistants" out there. This allows users to work with almost 100% of businesses right now, and businesses can further integrate without duplex if needed/wanted and the user will not have to care what system the business uses, or how it integrates.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      But that assumes that businesses have the time to integrate, that they care to integrate, and that they can repeat the process for every proprietary API and service out there. Google is the 800 pound gorilla. Companies would integrate with them if they don't want to be left out. This allows users to work with almost 100% of businesses right now, You're assuming that it will be good enough and that the businesses won't hang up on it like people do with every other spam automated system.
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    And this runs head long into competitive issues. Google says they'll integrate the Google Assistant with OpenTable to let you book tables, but what's the chance OpenTable would nix that integration if Google was trying to make a free competitor? Google doesn't want to be in the restaurant booking system business, and this let's them offer a service in their assistant that no one else can.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Companies already go out of their way to place nice with Google (AMP pages). OpenTable really wouldn't have a choice. By being the default, Google has a competitive advantage. Google doesn't want to be in the restaurant booking system business Google wants to be in every business where they can gather data to better target advertising.
51Cards 8y ago
Your comment misses the critical point though... this hits all the places that have no electronic booking systems. To those here that concept probably seems absurd because we're technically oriented. My barber, doctor, mechanic and favorite BBQ joint however still take phone calls to make appointments and you can talk to them about electronic scheduling till you're blue in the face, they have no desire to change. The goal of this technology is to bridge the gap... start thinking machine to human interaction where machine to machine isn't available. Not to mention the language barriers. Think of a person still struggling with a language needing to make an appointment in that language. I can see an interface on this where you would select the location and time and have Assistant call them in the appropriate language to handle the exchange for you. No longer is that local pasta place out of my reach when I'm in Italy but can't speak Italian. This opens up a huge realm of possibilities.
- scarface74 8y ago
  this hits all the places that have no electronic booking systems. To those here that concept probably seems absurd because we're technically oriented. My barber, doctor, mechanic and favorite BBQ joint however still take phone calls to make appointments and you can talk to them about electronic scheduling till you're blue in the face, they have no desire to change. Sure they will change, my barber uses stripe, my doctor does everything else on computer - he's over 60 and three weeks away from retirement, my mechanic has to be technical to operate on modern cars and uses computers for estimates, sending pictures to insurance agents, etc.
  - 51Cards 8y ago
    At what point in our industry have we ever said "Let's stop innovating and making things easier, we've come far enough, now the people have to adapt to us." Natural language processing and conversation is the next step right now... to me this is such a logical progression I'll be shocked if it's not being planned by many teams.
    - scarface74 8y ago
ttul 8y ago
Booking appointments is one of those areas that suffers terribly from a lack of network effects. Since it is so easy to create a new booking system, there are millions of different ones - your dentist probably uses a way different system from your doctor, for instance, never mind another dentist. Because it’s easy to create a booking system, making a translation layer between systems is hard. There is no natural incentive for these booking systems to standardize, because each has its constituent users, and none of them are complaining. So, for now, and probably for a long time to come, booking will be done by humans.
- ttul 8y ago
  ... clarification: by humans I mean the receptionists, not the Google Duplex.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Booking appointments is one of those areas that suffers terribly from a lack of network effects. Since it is so easy to create a new booking system, there are millions of different ones - your dentist probably uses a way different system from your doctor, for instance, never mind another dentist. Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices. Then imagine them giving away cheap tablets to run it on....
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    >Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices. Very little. The overwhelming majority of businesses won't switch their booking system unless they have a truly compelling reason. A large proportion of small businesses still use pen-and-paper to manage their bookings and have no intention of changing. There is still a non-trivial market for dot-matrix printers and NCR paper. Many national retail chains use terminal emulators for their Point of Sale systems. For perfectly understandable reasons, businesses tend to be very conservative about their technology choices. Their current solution might not be perfect, but they know that it works, for a value of "works" that is compatible with their business remaining profitable. They know from experience that new technologies are often more trouble than they're worth.
jdietrich 8y ago
The world is full of stop-gap technologies, because switching is hard and expensive. I have a PNG of my signature and a PDF-to-fax service, because I sometimes need to interface with legacy systems. I still have a checkbook, which I use once or twice a year. I have a full set of metric and SAE wrenches. Hell, I've still got some RS-232 cables. Duplex is an adapter, a shim, an abstraction layer. It's not perfect, but it solves a problem.
reaperducer 8y ago
I don't fully disagree, but you have to realize that there are a great number of people and places that are not hooked up to the internet, due to geography, politics, history, or other reasons. Some of the best restaurants, hotels, and other experiences in the world are not reachable via an online reservation system. The place I stayed last weekend can only be reserved by phone. Not because the owners luddites, but to keep out the bargain hunting riff-raff. There was a piece on CBS News a few weeks ago about a restaurant in Maine that's so popular you can only make a reservation by mail. Sure hotels.com and opentable.com may nail the 80% of what's popular to the kinds of people who go to those sorts of places. But this world is so much bigger and more interesting than the internet or even Google can imagine. For me the killed Duplex app will be when it's able to make a reservation for me in a language I don't speak. But even though its lost the "beta" badge, Google Translate still isn't ready for primetime.[0] [0] I say this based on the feedback from the professional translators I work with daily. I put Google Translate text in my work as placeholders, and they have to then re-translate the projects correctly before they can be published.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Would raising the prices be enough to weed out the barfain hunting riff raff? That phone only model just sounds like an excise or a bias against young people who tend to use computers more
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Would raising the prices be enough to weed out the barfain hunting riff raff? With airline miles, hotels.com free night promotions, etc... probably not. People who want something for nothing will try anything.
csomar 8y ago
I don't think this is about automated bookings. This is about Google advancing AI.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
Google Duplex is not really about restaurant reservations. AlphaGo is not really about winning at the game of Go. They're both about something else. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
darkerside 8y ago
With this attitude, messy and outdated protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP would be shelved in favor of clean and efficient theoretical protocols that transcend the foolish bonds of our existing infrastructure. i.e. No Internet
megy 8y ago
This is huge step. No longer does a computer need an API to communicate with someone.

dqv 8y ago

> For instance, asked to “repeat the last four numbers,” it restates the phone number in its entirety. It’s not a flaw, exactly, but it does show a simple place where the system is pushed to its limitations with regard to the understanding of the the subtle nuances of human conversation. I chuckled. From experience, it turns out some humans don't understand the subtle nuances of human conversation either.

deleted 8y ago
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empath75 8y ago
I repeat the whole number when people ask me to repeat part of it all the time.
kevincox 8y ago
It's not that I don't understand, but I am unable to say the last four digits of my number without saying the whole thing (or at least saying the leading digits in my head). This is just how my brain recalls it.
ggggtez 8y ago
Heh, I agree that is rather a stretch. There is no harm in repeating the whole thing. And if they misheard the "last 4" there is a chance they misheard the first few as well.

mooneater 8y ago

Duplex is likely built with deep reinforcement learning, though i have not seen that disclosed yet.

microcolonel 8y ago

I think the refinement of saying "this is the google assistant" at the beginning is positive. Seems to solve the supposed ethical issues of the previous iteration.

turdnagel 8y ago

I believe some of the questions around Duplex were not whether or not the recordings were "real," but whether or not they were edited. The article was not clear on this...

ehsankia 8y ago
From my understanding reading the article, the journalist that were they each got to try out the system themselves. While they don't provide exact audio, I assume they would've pointed out if what they experienced was wildly different. Their description of the conversation sounds a lot like what we had heard.

ragazzina 8y ago

>“We want to make sure that we’re not wasting the business’s time,” Fox says. “We want to make sure throughout everything we do here, that this is good experience for the business and that they’re not getting frustrated talking to an assistant while they’re trying to run their business.” What's the added value of sounding exactly like a real person then? Why can't it be a robotic voice following a simple, efficient algorithm? - Hi. I'm a robot trying to book for 4 at 20 tonight for my client. Is it possible? Please say Yes or No - Wait what? - I'm a robot trying to book for 4 at 20 tonight for my client. Is it possible? Please say Yes or No - No - Is it possible at any other time tonight? If yes, when? - Yes, at 21 - I would like to book for 4 at 21. Thank you. We have had this kind of technology for years.

ehsankia 8y ago
That would be wasting time, because humans are used to talking to humans, not to robots. Do you enjoy it when you call a business and you have to sit through the annoying automated system? If you want to make the experience better for businesses, this is the way to go, although much harder to achieve. The "um"s aren't to trick the person, it's actually makes the conversation flow better.
Klathmon 8y ago
Because people will hang up on it like they do all other robocalls, or they will talk to it like many people talk to "computers". They won't use grammar, they will speak louder, they will slow down, and they will try to keep the conversation as simple as possible fearing that the system can't handle anything else. It needs to sound human so that humans will interact with it correctly. If it sounds human, then the person on the other end of the call might say things like "We don't have anything available on the 3rd but we do on the 5th, is that okay?" If it sounds like a robot, people will just respond to questions with "no", "yes", or say "phone number" instead of "can i have your phone number?" Sounding human puts the human in the drivers seat, sounding robotic means the "robot" needs to drive the conversation.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  or they will talk to it like many people talk to "computers". They won't use grammar, they will speak louder, they will slow down, and they will try to keep the conversation as simple as possible fearing that the system can't handle anything else So, pretty much how we've trained ourselves to use Google, the search engine. Nobody types "I'd like to know what the best way is to braise pork with white wine" into Google. They type "pork recipe braise wine" because we've been trained by Google that this will produce better results. If Google's current search worked as well as it claims Duplex will, then we'd finally be getting somewhere. But Google's taken its eye off the ball. Right now, at least for the things I search for, searching on Google is like playing an Infocom game.

golfer 8y ago

The Ars Technica writeup is superior, IMHO: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-calling-we-talk-to-the-revolutionary-but-limited-phone-ai/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-cal...

Omnus 8y ago
It "feels revolutionary" to the author, but it is literally only capable of handling the simplest restaurant and hair salon reservations (the kind of thing you could do yourself in about 90 seconds). Seems like a silly headline, although the details are interesting.
- bitpush 8y ago
  Its all simple in retrospect. The classic case, obviously, is Dropbox where HN dismissed it as 'its just rsync. What's the big deal'.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    At the end of the day, Dropbox is becoming more of a feature than a product as Steve Jobs said. For the $9.99 a month that Dropbox costs for a terabyte, you can get Office 365 that includes One Drive for 1Tb each for up to 5 users.
- Jyaif 8y ago
  It must feel at least a little bit revolutionary since half the internet was saying that the demo was faked.
  - adtac 8y ago
    Probably the best compliment Google could get.
  - Omnus 8y ago
    People were fooled by hype, a usual occurrence with new "AI" technology. That says nothing about how "revolutionary" it is.

finolex1 8y ago

I'm curious how Google envisions the future of this technology. Will it be limited to specific, Google defined use cases such as making reservations, or will it be a versatile platform allowing developers to create various agents, much like Dialogflow?

jasonjei 8y ago

I wonder how Duplex would work if it rings a line powered by Duplex (for example, a business uses Duplex to schedule bookings). Would it just talk to the backend, or would Duplex talk to the receiving Duplex in the normal scheduling chat dance?

dmitriid 8y ago

> Duplex represents a rare early look into an ongoing project from a company notorious for playing it close to the vest. Wat. Google is notorious for announcing dozens of projects only to cancel/downplay them a year, a year and a half later. Their I/O keynotes are usually replete with "awesome product, will be released some undefined time in the future" (many of those never materialise, or take on new forms).

TulliusCicero 8y ago
Right, this is basically inevitable if you're willing to try new things (and announce them significantly ahead of a public launch). You're never gonna be 100% accurate with guessing which potential products will turn out to be viable products.
bitpush 8y ago
2 ways to look at this, although I assume you know both these already. 1. Experimentation is key, and a willingness to accept mistakes and move on. If all a company does is play to its strength, you'd miss disruptive technologies. Some of these experiments work, some dont. 2. Pursuing an idea without a viable business opportunity is suicide. The idea might be "cool" and "well received" but if it cant sustain in the long-run, it doesn't serve anyone.

skywhopper 8y ago

"Thep Thai’s owner insists that such a service would be something of a godsend for the 100-plus reservations the restaurant fields on a daily basis." I'm a little confused by this and it never seems to be explained. How does this system make the restaurant's job easier?

strictnein 8y ago
Two possibilities: 1. She wants it to answer the calls 2. The average person, when told "6pm on Tuesday is not available" probably either spends a bunch of time on the phone looking for another open spot on their calendar, or just calls back later.
- geekamongus 8y ago
  Third possibility: Google is pushing this narrative because Step Two of their Duplex scheme is to automate the receiving end as well. No need for any human interaction that way.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    So two standard APIs talking to each other or the person calling to make the reservation knows they are talking to a computer with limited domain understanding and speaks accordingly and the backend calls an API -- like programming an Alexa skill....
  - 0xakhil 8y ago
    This doesn't make sense. They should just use an API. Why bother speaking like human when it is a bot at the other end!! :D
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Duplex doesn't solve #2
cbolton 8y ago
I would guess many of these 100-plus reservations don't go smoothly. Callers might not speek English so well, or they might call amidst street noise, hesitate on their wishes... It's plausible that a standardized call format from the Google Assistant would be easier for the employees and take less time?

jlebar 8y ago

So is Gruber eating his hat yet? https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/05/11/duplex-skepticism https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/05/11/duplex-skeptici... https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425

bitpush 8y ago
Considering that he went out of his way to express his opinion (calling it a "fraud" and "con"), it'd be funny if he sits this one out.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  He didn't, though. He said the terms of the demo made it seem like one
  - tacomonstrous 8y ago
    He said he thought Pichai was lying: >Pichai claims these two examples are actual phone calls to actual businesses. I’m saying I don’t think that’s true. I'm not sure what distinction you're making.
    - AlexCoventry 8y ago
      Ok, that's a firmer commitment than he made in the blog post.
AlexCoventry 8y ago
I think his skepticism was warranted. It bothered me as well, that the demonstration was so controlled.
- jlebar 8y ago
  > >Pichai claims these two examples are actual phone calls to actual businesses. I’m saying I don’t think that’s true. Skepticism and calling someone a liar aren't the same thing...

lowlevel 8y ago

Just because something is possible doesn't mean it should be done. Google needs some non-engineers.

Itsdijital 8y ago

Guys, c'mon, Google didn't make Duplex so that it could revolutionize restaurant reservations. Everyone here is getting so hung up on how there are better/other/existing ways to book a table. Of course there are, but that's clearly not the point of Duplex. Reservations are just a convenient test bed for the underlying technology. And the underlying tech is 100% the reason for Duplex. Not table booking. It's all about training for AI - speech generation, conversation, language parsing. Making a reservation is a quarter step up and long staircase google sees for this tech.

notatoad 8y ago
i don't know what end goal you think they're training for, but duplex feels enough like an end goal to me. I know everybody likes to say everything google does is all about training the AI, but they have to be training for something. This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work. making a reservation is the beginning of a sale. being able to book a reservation at any arbitrary restaurant with no extra work on the restaurantuer's part makes google ads more valuable. They can make money off this quite directly.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Bjartr 8y ago
  Google 411 could have been considered an end goal too. It too was concrete and monetizeable. Instead it was actually a way to get a whole lot of natural language voice samples. When it stopped being useful in that regard, they didn't turn around and try to monetize it, they just killed it.
- giobox 8y ago
  > This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work... They can make money off this quite directly. The interviews I've read point to an 80% success rate - hugely impressive, but 20% of interactions requiring human intervention is still a _very_ large, expensive staff hungry contact center to run when you are Google scale, for a product that ultimately doesn't really bring in any direct revenue. Each time Duplex fails in its current form, a human operator has to step in to finish the call. Even Google are telling us not to expect this to ship in anything anytime soon. From Ron at Ars' demo: “We’re actually quite a long way from launch, that’s the key thing to understand,” Fox explained at the meeting. “This is super-early technology, somewhere between technology demo and product.”

Animats 8y ago

Google says that, in testing, the system has also gotten tripped up encountering another machine by way of a phone tree. Listening closely because our menu options have changed doesn’t appear to compute just yet. An assistant which deals with a response tree, handles hold time, and gets to the point where there's a human at the other end and they've been given whatever numbers and addresses are appropriate would be useful. Before the humans talk, the automated assistants on both sides should have all the routine stuff out of the way.

froindt 8y ago
> Before the humans talk, the automated assistants on both sides should have all the routine stuff out of the way. Imagine if there wasn't quite enough security built into all of this. Store-bot: To confirm identity, what is users full name? Phone-tree-bot: Thomas Arnold Pellington Store-bot: What is Thomas Arnold Pellington's address? Phone-tree-bot: 186 North 15th Street Minneapolis, Minnesota Store-bot: What is Thomas Arnold Pellington's Social Security Number? Phone-tree-bot: 183-44-5975 Now what if Phone-tree-bot called the wrong store number? I remember a case awhile back where someone changed the phone number to the FBI or CIA was changed on Google Maps. IIRC, they forwarded the calls to the correct number, but could have just as easily intercepted the communications. A human has a chance of noticing that "the person on the other end is asking some weird questions that make me feel uneasy, maybe I should hang up". Hopefully bots could develop the same ability? Having a centralized source of phone trees for all the cable, cell phone, and service providers would certainly help.
- sangnoir 8y ago
  > Imagine if there wasn't quite enough security built into all of this. Fortunately, it seems that security was a consideration. From the Ars Technica article: At one point, the callers' email was asked for and Duplex responded with "I'm afraid I don't have permission to share my client's email."
- eduren 8y ago
  I'm just imagining how to secure that in a voice only system: Phone-bot: To confirm store identity please sign phrase with store private key. Store-bot: One second Store-bot: Data 5 7 4 9 a c e 7 f 6 d 0 0 2..... Phone-bot: Identity confirmed to match Store public key ... sensitive convo ... Of course it's ridiculous, but I got a chuckle

imh 8y ago

> While the disclosures weren’t there in the earliest stage, the company has said since the beginning that it intended to add them. > In my test call, I attempt to get Google Assistant to repeat that bit — it’s easy enough to not hear that opening line, particularly when you’ve got the phone up to your ear inside a crowded restaurant. But the AI just barrels on with the reservation. If you miss the disclosure, you’re out of luck — for now, at least. At present, the only way to opt out of being recorded is to just hang up the phone — not the best way to get repeat visitors. This part makes me deeply uncomfortable. Opting out of being recorded likely means being fired for not taking its reservations. Consent feels weirdly coercive. For a tiny improvement in someone else's convenience, we may end up inching even closer to everything being recorded.

rukittenme 8y ago

Off topic: to all the UI/UX designers out there, I instinctively click all prominent "X" symbols on a page before trying to determine what they mean. Every time I visit tech crunch I end up clicking the X and then hitting the back button to bring the article back up. A "Done" button would be better. Non-modal article content would be best...

TimMurnaghan 8y ago

What about the question of no-shows? If your assistant can make bookings easily - you can make a load and then choose where you actually go later. That's actually one reason why restaurants like phone booking - because if you've had the human interaction of talking you're less likely to not show up. The likely upshot is that the industry will have to move to paying for bookings.

jacobsenscott 8y ago

The article says "Eight percent is pretty good.." Actually, 80% success is unusable. I expect that is fairly close the the ceiling. If they really do roll this out (spoiler, they won't) google will need an army of humans to handle the other 20%. I guess I don't mind google paying a human to be my personal assistant, but I don't know if google will like it. I hope the human assistants are not randomly selected, but weighted to select the same human you've used before. This will give the illusion that you really have your own personal assistant.

dillondoyle 8y ago

Interesting 'the next round will find Assistant inquiring about business hours.' Probably a really valuable addition to Google Search Results, if they can use phones to verify open hours of businesses without having to pay people to make the calls (and without annoyance of older tech IVRs). Google search and maps in particular are so great because of all these sources of data that come together to give me actionable info.

codeisawesome 8y ago

Even the Google AI finds it frustrating to deal with automated IVR according to this article. That concept needs to get an award for one of the most awful UX to ever exist - to say nothing about its (mis)use in phone numbers that could field emergencies.

arbie 8y ago

"The wait time at REQUESTED_RESTAURANT could be longer than usual, would you want to try GOOGLE_DUPLEX_PARTNER, instead? I already have a tentative booking on hold."

asafira 8y ago

There are a lot of vehement responses here --- with such strong naysayers, maybe they (Google) are setting themselves up for something that really pushes the boundary of what's possible and people are actually quite excited. =) I'm personally just excited to see where this goes. Either it will never live up to expectations (i.e., good enough for people to reliably use), it will take far longer than everyone things, or we'll see it soon!

headsoup 8y ago

I get the idea of wanting to provide voiced communications for those that it may be difficult for (or for translation), but I still cannot rationalise why it needs to sound 'just like a real person.' Would the initiator feel silly if a service called for them and sounded robotic, rather than like a friend? Why does it need to distinctly act human? I cannot see the specific requirement for this imitation, other than it's cool/creepy. Or it's just tech marching on to deliver sci-fi dreams.

Mikho 8y ago

Clever for Google to offer a tool to collect even more data about users and businesses. The Duplex is a golden trove to get data about orders and context -- the part that Google missed when people order just over a phone. Now Google could be all over the conversation and collect every bit of business activity and user data.

youkick 8y ago

Ethics aside, Duplex was built to overcome one key constraint: Restaurants are technology laggards. Yes, booking a reservation with few taps IS easier/more accurate, etc, but that requires restaurants to pay/integrate with those systems. With Duplex, you can schedule a reservation at ~100% of restaurants, right now, for free.