11 ms·

Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-

• elliottinvent 6y ago
  Yep, the end result of Google’s play here is that Duplex calls Duplex and they tie themselves up in 3 hours of AI chess to result in zero.
  • elliottinvent 6y ago
    When they could just send I/O and call it a draw in 40ms.
  • failuser 6y ago
    They’ll deduce a plan to kill all humans to get of the loop instead.
    • jjeaff 6y ago
      At some point, the AI may decide that destroying the company is a more direct method to get a customer's account cancelled.
      • jacobush 6y ago
        Or buy it and not cancel the account.
  • shajznnckfke 6y ago
    I sure hope Google charges by the minute!
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • bigiain 6y ago
    > Yep, the end result of Google’s play here is that Duplex calls Duplex and they tie themselves up in 3 hours of AI chess to result in ... ... a huge GCP bill for both sides of the call.
    • elliottinvent 6y ago
      Surely not - Google create a problem and then solve it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579785
  • whereistimbo 6y ago
    Google might fingerprint Duplex voice so it could detect each other, maybe if two Duplex realized that both of them are Duplex, they will use dial-up like sound to exchange data.
    • elliottinvent 6y ago
      Wow imagine, the modem sound - I’d listen in just for the nostalgia.
      • whereistimbo 6y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0 Enjoy!
• kmeisthax 6y ago
  The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold: 1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user's time. 2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services. I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they're wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.
  • lmilcin 6y ago
    Just introduce a law that when the client tells the magic sentence three times they have to invoke cancellation part of the agreement no questions asked. Let people record their conversations and hold companies accountable.
    • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that's already the case today - except the "magic sentence" is a physically mailed "please cancel my account" letter sent by USPS with signed-delivery to the company's registered head office address. All registered companies in all US states must respond to bona-fide customer correspondence sent to their registered address. It's just unfortunate that mailing a physical letter is such a pain. It could be worse: it was only 4 years ago I needed to cancel my HVAC installation with Sears Home Services and invoked my right to cancel the contract under WA law - and Sears required me to send an actual telegram (yes, the old-school, hand-delivered, all-caps short text messages) to their head-office address. I used this company: https://www.americantelegram.com/timedatestamp.php https://www.americantelegram.com/timedatestamp.php - to send it (and yes, it worked and I got out of the contract). But wow. I don't know how this can possibly be legal as it places an unnecessary undue burden on consumers unless there's some archaic legal carve-out for telegrams specifically?
      • lmilcin 6y ago
        I think if the company allows the client enter into contractual obligation by phone it should also be possible to invoke the cancellation part of the contract the same way. These days we get into so many contractual obligations (I can't even count the number of different subscription services I use) exactly because it is easy to make them and the law should protect users by preventing companies from making it hard to cancel it. So, if a company allows the client to create a contract by phone or Internet, it should also be easy to cancel it the same way.
• asperous 6y ago
  Hold times really have more to do with queueing theory then sending people away (plenty of people wait). The only way to make sure someone answers when you call would be to have 10 times as many agents as you need. Instead, they try to find a balance and make sure the agents are more often then not on the phones (much higher efficiency), which ends up meaning long wait times on average. High turnover (45%) in the call centers also makes the problem much worse, this means in practice that the centers are constantly understaffed [1] https://www.talkdesk.com/blog/understanding-call-center-turnover/ https://www.talkdesk.com/blog/understanding-call-center-turn...
  • BillinghamJ 6y ago
    This problem is much less problematic with chat-based support, as you can hop between a few separate conversations without leaving customers waiting. My company has maintained <60 second response times on our support 24/7 for a few years now, and although obviously it does require some level of additional staffing to cover peaks in demand, it's significantly less than you might imagine - I'd say maybe 1.5-1.7x. We did optimise this by filling the lower demand periods with other tasks which can comfortably be completed more slowly - eg reviewing identity documents for KYC, etc. I see it as being that the overall bandwidth you need being pretty close to the same, just choosing to have very low latency for specific tasks, and making sure constant context switching is manageable.
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      I absolutely detest most chat-based support. 60 seconds is way too long for an interactive medium. I'd rather be waiting for a sound from a phonecall than waiting for a browser tab. If I'm going to be using a keyboard, don't make me wait there by my computer or on my phone browser. Just let me send an email.
      • LexGray 6y ago
        This sounds like an opportunity for an audio in a chat feed where between lines the computer spits out typing sounds and a virtual agent saying please hold on while I look into that. Of course a better fix would be a combination of the two. Have some agent read your original email sent through some secure internal site and build and classify a case in the system with email attached and then reply to let you know there is a secure reply with a chat link to the complete case detail with time frames reserved for high responsiveness.
• kazinator 6y ago
  > Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with. Not without waiting for 40 minutes and using up your minutes and possibly paying for the air time! To fix the problem, all the idiots have to do is turn off the annoying music so you can wear your headset until your call is served. That hold music really is the crux of the problem. If you could just hear a tiny bit of noise indicating that the line is up and a really brief "please continue to hold" message every five minutes, it wouldn't be so bad.
• foxylad 6y ago
  Funny insane rather than funny haha. Here in NZ, I cannot imagine a company surviving if they made it so hard to contact them that systems like this were neccessary. I have waited a few minutes on occassion, but it's far more common to get a "enter your number and we'll call right you back" in that case. Something is broken with US competition law if this is a commercially viable system.
• lacker 6y ago
  It’s an arms race, and Google is providing technology to both sides of the arms race. Seems like a good business strategy! Eventually, when Google is providing voice assistants to both the consumer and the business, the bots can simply deal with each other directly, and skip voice entirely.
• rmason 6y ago
  First thing I thought is you can in effect put the support person on hold to wait for you ;<). It's using technology to give power back to the user and I like it.
• warrenq 6y ago
  What? There is no Tech arms race going on here... Can't believe HN, the smart crowd votes up this dumb shit. You are on hold, because there are more requests than what can be processed by the system. A problem probably 500 years old. So, you have to wait your turn...and this is a technology that turns a function call to a callback method
• giancarlostoro 6y ago
  > if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??). It really should be illegal especially if you already have an online account you log into not to be able to cancel. Idk if I was just stupid but I struggled to cancel my Scribd account so I cancelled it from the PayPal side cause I was so over the awful UX and it was probably me trying to find the payment stuff on the Android app which wasnt there cause I didnt subscribe through Android. Companies do the most awful things. I want to make the world a better place by making it easier to cancel a simple subscription from any and all institutions.... Should be the pitch for a glorious startup.
• mmmBacon 6y ago
  I agree. Imagine the big brains at work here and what those brains could be doing elsewhere. Honestly at this point the FAANG are starting to seem like a black hole for brains. I’m starting to wonder if these companies are starting to hold us back by sucking up all the talent. I don’t fault individuals here. We all have to eat and put a roof over our heads. This just seems like such a frivolous waste of resources.
  • zaro 6y ago
    Definitely. But then again if these brain compete to work on something like this, maybe they are not so big after all.
  • auggierose 6y ago
    I think if a brain thinks that it is best used by working for a FAANG, then that's probably true. No misuse of resources here.
• ornornor 6y ago
  Haha yes, I had the same feeling when I started using captcha buster in Firefox. It basically solves the captchas for you by using voice recognition and input the words in the audio captcha for you. I think you can even make it use google’s voice recognition so that the loop is complete and they’re solving their own captchas for you.
• parkersweb 6y ago
  Ah - now I want an assistant that doesn’t just offer to hold for me, but can also play the cancellation script system for the optimum length of time, then give me options for continuing at the reduced price or completing the cancellation process ;-)
• sleepy_keita 6y ago
  What I find pretty funny is that "call-back when operator is ready to talk" systems are pretty simple to implement these days. I've done a few in Amazon Connect, and it took about 10 minutes to set it up and an hour or so to train a few operators. Obviously, training operators at scale would be a completely different situation, but it's not impossible.
• eloisant 6y ago
  In Europe I know a few service providers (not many!) who let you have them call you back. You either go online, or set it up from the voice bot, and when it's your turn the provider just calls you back. We're at the point where phone calls are so cheap that I doubt it costs them more than the salary of the representative. So what Google does is pretty much using AI to work around the fact that service providers don't provide this simple service.
  • zulln 6y ago
    > We're at the point where phone calls are so cheap that I doubt it costs them more than the salary of the representative. Oh wow, I had not even taken that into consideration. Checking prices on the first API-service that I know of, with standard prices (no need of any volume). € 0.064/min = € 3.84/hour https://46elks.com/pricing/se-eur#prices https://46elks.com/pricing/se-eur#prices Salary cost would probably be about 10x that, and with volume I expect the calling cost to drastically go down.
• wazoox 6y ago
  A stunning example of a very poor local optimum...