> The system also sounds more natural thanks to the incorporation of speech disfluencies (e.g. “hmm”s and “uh”s). These are added when combining widely differing sound units in the concatenative TTS or adding synthetic waits, which allows the system to signal in a natural way that it is still processing. (This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts.) In user studies, we found that conversations using these disfluencies sound more familiar and natural.
This part stuck out to me during the Google I/O demo, as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.
It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.
Yep, and the 10 second "deal" compilations for travel packages really happen in a fraction of a second. They just purposefully delay the results to make it seem like they are doing a lot of processing in finding all the possible deals and showing you the best ones.
Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.
It can be a more friendly way of rate-limiting expensive DB queries. An interstitial that says "too many queries, try again in 10 seconds" is far more annoying than a loading bar.
It's really just an audio version of a loading bar or spinner - users get really uncomfortable if the UI becomes unresponsive for even a few hundred milliseconds, but they'll wait for several seconds if it looks like something is happening.
People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.
OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing.
Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays.
Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress; in most cases, this could be greatly improved with a bit of educated guesswork.
A completely fictitious progress bar can be extremely credible, because it's totally predictable - if you need to create a 10 second delay, then it's easy to make the bar progress linearly from 0% to 100% in that time. Users learn very quickly that your progress bar tells the truth about how long they'll be waiting, even though it's lying about the reason for the wait.
> Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress
I disagree with this; I find the progress bars more credible with erratic timing. (And ideally, a display of the task currently at hand, like "Copying tiny file. Copying tiny file. Copying giant file............")
A progress bar that smoothly fills from 0 to 100 looks like an animation that somebody thought it would make you happy to watch. A progress bar that lags at 7% and then rushes the rest of the way looks like the software has some internal metric for task completion, and is reporting according to that metric. This implies that when the number changes, progress has happened, which isn't the case for a progress bar that isn't affected by workload.
The software can't use "how much time has elapsed?" as a progress metric, because it doesn't know how much time things will take, and because the passage of time does not actually cause -- or reflect -- any progress. That progress bar would be a spinner, not a progress bar.
> Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays.
Strongly disagree. A spinner on the web UI element that lasts longer than ~1 second indicates for me that the site's JavaScript broke again, and it's time to reload or wait for the devs to notice and fix it.
I'm talking exactly about that spinner. It's a lie. You quickly learn it has no relation whatsoever to what's happening in the background. And indeed it doesn't, because it's an animated GIF, completely detached from any logic or networking code!
(Compare the CLI spinner/fan - that "/ - \ |" animation used to indicate progress. There you know that each tick of the spinner means work has been done, because it has to be animated from code, and it's much simpler to just update it from the code that does the work.)
I was talking about animation. Show/hide on request made/resolved gives only binary information about starting and finishing something. But the spinning animation itself does not represent any operations being executed. It may very well be that the request failed and a bug in JS made it not remove the spinner. You end up with a forever-looping animation of "work", even though no work is being done. This makes the spinner an untrustworthy element.
Still better than nothing? Sure, maybe sometimes exceptions aren't handled properly, but at least you know that it was trying to do something, rather than having users click a submit button 10x because there was no UI feedback whatsoever.
The most annoying part of progress bars is the fact that programs so often use multiple bars. What's the point of watching a bar slowly reach 100%, only for it to be replaced with another progress bar that starts from 0 again?
The "please wait while we verify your passcode" on our corporate phone conference system drives me nuts. In the time that it took to speak that sentence, the passcode could have been verified millions of times.
In true market economy fashion, the comfort noise is also a perfect advertising opportunity.
For instance, I frequently deal with ATM machines that display "please wait" screens between every operation. Those screens last usually between 1 and 3 seconds, and it's obviously because the operations take that long, and totally not because they also display a half-screen or full-screen ad...
I've heard the HP12c calculator also slows down its screen refresh on purpose because people couldn't believe the math was right when it first came out and it was blazing fast.
Most of the flight search companies do the same ("Finding the best/cheapest flights for you"). It's almost instantaneous, but they introduce this artificial wait.
That seems unlikey. Flight search really does take a long time because they need to make API calls to external services for most customer requests and they need to refresh prices roughly hourly and so cannot rely on cached data. Also, even the best flight search websites are frustratingly slow. If that delay was created intentionally then they already lost me as a customer as a result.
I can't seem to find that post right now, but a person (on Quora/reddit I guess) who worked in the development team of a flight search company told this fact.
I don't know if I'd call it a "deficiency" - if we interpret "disfluency" in a literal sense as "not flowing" without negative connotation, then the interruptions (hmm, uh, okay) are actually communicating useful information to the other party. I might even say that omitting those interruptions (and replacing them with, say, dead silence) might be poor communication.
The "um" isn't a deficiency, but the slow response is. If the response is artificially delayed to give the appearance of slow thinking, and an "um" added to fill the artificially long silence, that's an artificial deficiency.
It's not a deficiency if understanding is increased. If that fake pause increases the listener's understanding of the sentence (it might), then the 'slow response' is not a deficiency but an improvement.
Edit: should the robot talk at 2x normal speaking speed in order to more quickly convey the necessary information? Slowing the speech down artificially so a human could easily understand it sounds like a deficiency to me. (By your definition).
I interpreted it differently. It isn't to give the appearance of slow thinking. It is to wait for the other person to be ready to accept the answer.
When talking to real humans, I've encountered people who don't do this, and I find it makes communication difficult and frustrating.
I'm not 100% sure why I need this pause, but I know I need it. Maybe I'm considering whether my question made sense or needs corrections/additions, so that I can't focus on the answer yet. Or maybe it takes time to switch the brain from "speaking mode" to "listening mode".
At any rate, when people do this, I have to ask them to repeat the first few words they said because I didn't catch them. And the reason I didn't catch them wasn't mumbling or background noise or anything. Well-formed sounds made it to my ear just fine, but my brain wasn't ready to accept them for a fraction of a second.
> as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.
well, in semantics/pragmatics these discourse particles are often not deficiencies at all. They are signals with practical semantic purpose. "hmms" and "uhs" can signal attentiveness, turn-taking (turn holding, turn yielding, etc), agreement - just to name a few.
For any machine system to be able to pass as human, it will have to be able to control these nuances or people will pick up on something being wrong, though they might not be able to articulate precisely what.
I really enjoyed the machine's "uhs" and "uhms" in the demo speech. However, I felt the "uh-huh"s sounded forced. It's funny how these subtleties are very important in human conversation.
People are more willing get on board with bots acting like people than the other way around.
The speech disfluencies used by Duplex in the salon and restaurant interactions are perfect examples of why natural speech sounds natural. It's the cadence as well as the timing.
If you are building a system that mimics human speech you need to teach it to be imperfect and use common parlance. Otherwise you will fall into the uncanny valley. If you listen to the conversation again there are several points where they lose immersion. For example no one would say 12 pm, they would say 'noon' instead. Google has clearly done some impressive work here, and I'm now a bit more confident/scared that they will be able to successfully fool me in the next few years.
Your argument about calling it "noon" instead of "PM" is just illogical. I'd always use PM instead of noon -- whenever I'm trying to be specific about something (appointments and such). I understand the argument you're trying to make but that wasn't enough.
I think historically "noon" expresses less precision, although I suspect that's less true now that everyone always knows what time it is and has GPS in their pocket to help calculate arrival times.
20 years ago, had I said to someone "I'll be there at 12pm" it would have had a stronger implication of precision than "I'll be there at noon." I don't think it's true today.
Understood. So the difference is you interpret "noon" as an ill-defined probability distribution centred roughly around midday, rather than a concrete point in time, whereas you interpret "12PM" as a concrete point in time. Fair enough.
12pm is also commonly interpreted as midnight so "12 noon" or "12 midnight" is generally preferred when scheduling meetings or deadlines in order to avoid confusion.
In my city I can recognize that google has two different 'voices' or voice libraries. They sound slightly different. I'm curious how that works and why it's not all done with one.
My understanding is that the "low-fi", more robotic one uses an offline TTS engine for when there is no connectivity. When connectivity is good, it will switch to better, cloud-based one.
Similar to how when designing a virtual face, it looks more natural if it has some slight asymmetries and "defects", and when designing a synthetic drumbeat, if it's "perfect" it sounds totally robotic.
Imperfection is natural and comfortable. Perfect corners and edges are artificial and weird to the distracting point.
Reminds me of comfort noise in the telephone system.
Even though the system encodes silences noise free (so improve compression), it deliberately inserts noise because otherwise people think the line is dead.
In the case where the person on the other end isn't a native english speaker, (the calling a restaurant clip) why doesn't Google figure out what language they speak and speak it to them?
Currently I'm working on a similar project. Building a GAN (generative adversarial network) for voice is a lot of work and testing, you need a big dataset for labeled voices. Wavenet currently support English[0]. Also you need a neural NLP model for this language.
I would imagine that a lot of the work that goes into making the speaking so natural would be very specific to English. As in, they would need to repeat 50% of the work for each language.
Do Scots count as native English speakers? What about the Irish? English has a very large number of accents and dialects that all count as 'English', but typically speech recognition software only works one variety.
I think the person you are responding to might have been talking about those who speak the language Scots, not just Scottish people.
Many consider Scots to be an actual language separate from English. There's a good amount of debate about this among linguists, I think.
For anyone curious, I recommend reading these pages from the recent Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book to get a feel for how it differs from English.
Never have we had a more clear example of why Google needs to be regulated, and laws against what they're doing needs to be passed.
The fact that they think it's okay to have bots pretending to be human making phone calls, shortly after demonstrating how quickly they can copy someone's voice (re: John Legend), it shows a blatant disregard for what they're creating.
At the very least, there should be an requirement to identify when challenged.
"Are you a bot?" "Yes, I am Google Duplex v1.2. This call is being recorded; you can see our privacy policy and terms of service at http://google.com/duplex."
I agree, but the social pressure not to use it would be immense. Imagine the awkward moments where we start confronting people who call us and asking them if they're real.
It's already happening. I'm getting robo calls from some police donation fund that will slow down and restart speaking if you interrupt them (took me a few moments to realize it was a recording).
There's no way I should be bound by terms of service that are secret unless I know the "code-phrase" with which to ask for it. Google's whole point was to deceive the user into thinking it isn't a bot -- so you wouldn't even know to ask it.
People will be forced to "discover" that they've been lied to, when the bot is caught in a loop and they're going through emotional distress thinking the "person" on the other end is having some sort of mental breakdown.
It's illegal in many states to record a conversation without obtaining consent which is something this product does as a matter of course. This product shouldn't be legal to operate in those states, so you don't have to look very far before finding critical flaws in this approach.
That said, "identify on challenge" is something that Google might be more likely to adopt rather than "identify on call pickup". The latter being something they might spend more lobbyist dollars to oppose.
But what you've said is certainly (or should be) a real concern.
I'm concerned that a lack of understanding and fear will limit the benefits we get from technology. I don't think that calling for regulation and making this illegal is the appropriate next step.
They explicitly say:
> We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context.
You note:
> laws against what they're doing needs to be passed.
What makes you say that robots making phone calls should be illegal? This seems an odd position to have. Do you also believe that it should be illegal for robots to clean floors? Or for your machine learning spam filter to process and filter your emails?
If I sound a little frustrated, I am. I'm scared that the future where technology allows us to do more with less will be blunted due to calls for making robot tasks illegal. I'd love if you'd help me understand what makes you take your position - I'm sure it's logical, and it's just a matter of me being able to understand your perspective. Can you help me understand?
I am far more afraid of technology we can't control that works for an ad company, not for us, than moving technology forward a little bit slower.
We need to be able to trust our communication, and we're moving away from that at light speed. Where a company whose entire business model is to subtly influence you in the directions profitable to them is the middleman in all of our communications.
I am terrified of this. I am not sure I've ever seen a presentation that terrified me more that wasn't out of a science fiction movie.
> I am far more afraid of technology we can't control that works for an ad company, not for us, than moving technology forward a little bit slower.
I'm not sure what you're arguing for - that you wish companies weren't driving technological advancement? That Google specifically shouldn't?
Also, it's very, very conceivable that there are people for whom this technology DOES work for. The mute, for example. I'm not sure it's appropriate to speak for all of "us".
Yeah and I had your view before the last 2 years and the 2016 election. All we've seen is this kind of technology will be abused to the gills to create fake propaganda, robocalls, and phishing scams.
I too want to absolutely, without a doubt, regulate or slow this stuff down until we can better understand how it can be abused. And WHEN it is abused, we have ways to address it and aren't constantly playing catchup to how people are badly using these things.
Does your secretary or father pretend to be you when making the appointment? Google Duplex is pretending to be a human without the knowledge or permission of the person on the other end of the call.
One of the samples claimed to be an agent acting on the behalf of a client. Google says they're still deciding on the best format for these calls--here's hoping they take the criticism of people like you into account, and go with something like that example.
Of course, I don't really see why there needs to be an attempt to pass as human at all. It would be fine with me if they just reinvented the phone tree with a better ux. Especially since it's billed as a business-facing call.
How would you handle deepfakes? This is much more disturbing than what is in the post, and it isn't a corporation who built it. I don't think this has anything to do with regulating google.
To be perfectly honest, I've always personally been surprised at what business people are willing to transact over the low-bandwidth media of the telephone. I've heard plenty of stories of people pretending to be celebrities and getting away with stuff on the phone; I don't need a sophisticated computer to do that for me.
If a real problem of deep-fakes in phone conversations emerges, people will just raise the bar of authentication in phone communications. There's nothing magical about telephone that makes it exempt from the general need to protect against social engineering.
The reality changes. Fast. You won't be able to trust photos, audio recordings, or videos. You will be able to trust digital signature. To have any opinion whether information about somebody else is real you will need a working web of trust. It's gonna be a great thing and I can't wait for it. It's going to change news, politics and in general the world we live in. It's going to be bigger than the Internet but way more polarizing and controversial. IMHO
One issue though, unless we hurry up and make this WoT decentralized and with open protocols, well, we will get it from FB and the likes.
Would you say the same thing if this tech was created by a small company?
Voice copying is nothing new, many methods exists so I don't see how Google doing this is somehow bad. It's uncanny to say the least, but laws against tech progress? Come on :)
Did you think that advancing AI will be not creepy especially when it's good?
Come on now, this is cool! the correct initial reaction is to be impressed.
What is concerning is the surprising prevalence of technophobic notions on tech focused boards such as this.
There is something perverse about wanting to punish a company for creating something cool, and it’s certainly not the way our society or politics should function.
This is awesome, awesome tech. I just showed it to a bunch of people in my office.
But at the same time, the last two years have shown us that a lot of technology is being very effectively abused to misinform at a geopolitical level, and we as a society need to better understand or regulate this stuff for sure. Lives are at stake.
That said, I'd never say that Google shouldn't work on this. It's amazing. We just need to better understand not just how it can be used, but also how it can be abused.
In the short/immediate term, it should probably be illegal to conduct a robocall without explicit opt-in of the destination caller. (Currently, if you get a non-telemarketed robocall, it is solicited, such as you scheduled an appointment and they are reminding you of it.)
Furthermore, if a robocall is permitted to be made to an unsolicited destination, a robocaller must clearly identify itself, presumably starting a declaration that it is a bot/automated agent from a given company on behalf of another company or individual.
And if the call is recorded in any way, shape, or form, the terms of service would need to be presented to the callee, giving them the chance to accept or deny said terms. (Note that if the example calls at I/O were not staged, and real calls, I suspect the recording of them would be illegal in many jurisdictions, including California.)
> In the short/immediate term, it should probably be illegal to conduct a robocall without explicit opt-in of the destination caller
Existing robocall law (including the National Do Not Call registry in the US) is focused around telemarketing. This isn't a telemarketing system; it's an automated assistant. I don't see the utility of applying the existing law to the new use case, as the goals are different (people at home don't want to be interrupted to be advertised at; businesses do want to negotiate business transactions).
> Furthermore, if a robocall is permitted to be made to an unsolicited destination, a robocaller must clearly identify itself, presumably starting a declaration that it is a bot/automated agent from a given company on behalf of another company or individual.
Why? If I have an assistant who makes an unsolicited call to a destination, they don't need to formally state they're acting on my behalf. What about automating the assistant's job makes it special?
I agree with you on the third point (I'm assuming Google has its bases covered there, because unilaterally recording a conversation is old and settled law).
As I said, it should be a law, I didn't expect the existing robocall laws to apply here. Note that in no way has Google explicitly limited itself to conducting business transactions merely because that is what it demonstrated here.
The issue is that the intermediary is a Google corporate entity, theoretically acting on the user's behalf, but at the end of the day, acting on Google's behalf. Consider that Google's bots may do things in Google's best interests, not the best interests of the party on either side of the transaction.
My assistant is another human being, theoretically acting on my behalf, but at the end of the day, acting on their own behalf. My recourse if our needs don't align is to fire them.
As we already have assistants who transmit our desires by proxy, I don't see much difference between a human and an automated script in that context---certainly not enough difference to justify the need for special-purpose law to clarify the nature of my assistant (and definitely not enough difference to justify shutting down the technology with only vague risk and no instances of social problems introduced by the tech).
> if the example calls at I/O were not staged, and real calls, I suspect the recording of them would be illegal in many jurisdictions, including California.
Interesting implications there for how Google will measure / improve the effectiveness of Duplex. Where is the line drawn between recording a call and recording data derived from a call? e.g. clearly recording the call unilaterally is illegal. Presumably just storing a hash of the audio data would be legal, but also useless. Is there some middle ground that is legal, but also useful?
The irony of someone named ‘...trekkie’, a fan of a future where a military alliance of uber powerful weaponry capable of destroying populations, while continually proclaiming they’re on a mission of peace, featuring computers pretending to be people and doing work for them, androids, and synthetic holographic ar/vr people criticizing primitive AI tech is a bit rich.
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.
Are you going to pass laws against realistic sounding synthetic voices? Against computers that understand queries “too well”? Against self driving vehicles that drive better and safer than people? All on theoretical harm that actually hasn’t taken place because you’ve watched too many dystopian Netflix sci-fi episodes?
I don’t know what’s more dangerous, the real Skynet, or people who might harm millions by voting for political policies that inhibit real improvements that could be made to help them.
At least, if you want to talk AI being used for harmful things we could discuss feed optimization that parasitizes people’s attention spans and keeps them glued or wasting money on pulling more slot machine levers. Technology that wastes people’s time and money as opposed to things that make people more efficient.
This is amazing! I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards with the same/fewer input resources.
In short, technology is a wonderful thing that allows very low marginal costs. This is what we need to make the future a better place, given a consistent or growing population.
"Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less." This is a perfect demonstration of that.
> I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards.
That's been the dream for a long time in some circles. With the enormous productivity gains and ability to leverage external energy sources (fossil fuels, solar, etc.) we could have built a society of wealth and leisure for all.
Maybe we will still. The hope is that if there is enough of a productivity gain in a short enough time period (like the introduction of AGI powered robots) that this could still happen.
The technology promises "wealth and leisure for all". The capital owners promise "it'll trickle down". Technical utopianists need to start tempering their optimism with the realities of human nature and design systems accordingly.
I think our only realistic hope is actually various non-profit foundations and such.
When you think about it, I can download (for zero cost), a high-quality operating system and attendant applications which would have cost hundreds of dollars 20 years ago, and would have cost a fortune 40 years ago. Ditto for educational materials, entertainment, etc.
In that sense, we are quite wealthy in comparison to previous generations. If charitable organizations can leverage the automation of the future to help people, we might then see all humans across the planet lifted out of poverty.
But yeah, I don't expect corporations to do this. And it seems unlikely that most governments will either.
Interesting perspective. I share your pessimism about corporations and governments.
But sadly I think government is the only institution with the necessary leverage (tax base, mandate, etc) to accomplish this. Non-profits are also fairly dubious in their motives, subject to corruption, and generally highly inefficient. I'm not sure they're going to be our saviors either.
Nonprofits are not a magical entities. I have found most very self-serving. Self-serving the founders whims, and "pockets".
Hell even the great Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation give so little back to the womb (America) that cultured/encouraged his money making career. It's almost like the wealthy hate their family?
We saw how Bush's Thousand Points of Light went. Humans are selfish. And the lack of spirituality is just making them more so.
2. At this point, I'm just seeing so many jobs being lost to people who don't expect much (yes--there are people who don't think much about putting six people in a 10 x 12 room), and jobs lost to technology.
3. I only see two ways out, and most of you won't like it.
A. Tax the wealthy more.
During and after WW2 we were taxing Them at 90%, and they didn't complain. It takes the fear of death to lessen the drip on their wad?
B. Tie all Fees/fines to income.
We're all in this mess together.
I don't see a rosy future. I just see more homeless.
The wealthy realized they don't need their family (America). They have the world to sell, and exploit to.
I got off track, but don't see nonprofits curing our problems.
Average income and wealth has massively increased over the last century, so we are slowly but surely getting to that utopia. But it happens at a pace that is too slow to be experientially perceptible.
I would add however that there does appear to be some barrier limiting the ability of ordinary people to accumulate financial capital, and I attribute that to friction/fixed-costs imposed by regulations.
New services, like Robinhood, and technology, like cryptocurrency, could address this, and allow wider participation in capital markets.
I don't consider the present highly problematic, though it is imperfect.
The problem is the relatively imminent (next 50-100 years) reality of nearly complete human obsolescence. That's when you'll see societal degradation at previously unthinkable levels. And no that's not Luddite fallacy. The next epoch of technological innovation is going to be unlike any that came before.
A lot of people champion UBI, while forgetting that something like 3B+ people currently live on less than $2.50 a day. That's really all the evidence you need to know that the future is going to be pretty grim. Do we think it's more likely that plutocratic systems will award sustainable UBI packages to the mass unemployed via wealth transfer (which is anathema in said systems) or that market forces will discover the absolute minimum survivable income level and create new strata in first-world societies that hover just above pure barbarism?
What past productivity improvements and/or economic developments have ever pointed to your fantasy being realized? How will thousands of workers in the Philippines and India losing their call center jobs result in "higher and higher living standards?"
I'm sorry but given historical context and popular capitalist intent, this future you speak of is simply fantastical. The working class would sooner be made extinct before a Jetsons-esque future of leisure for all came to fruition.
I recommend you look at the statistical evidence. The average wage in the developing world has doubled, and the global poverty rate has halved, over the last 20 years. That's all thanks to automation.
The wage growth has been widely distributed, though I don't know the median wage statistics off hand. I presume they're approximately equavalent average wage statistics.
As for jobs, most of those that existed 200 years ago no longer exist or employ a tiny fraction of people they employed at that time, yet we don't have mass unemployment. Automation has never had a broad-based negative impact on the demand for labor. Its effect has been exactly the opposite.
Just wait until a Google Duplex caller "on behalf of a client" calls to schedule a reservation at a restaurant using Google Duplex to answer the phones.
Since the restaurant in this situation is clearly using a digital booking system already why would Google (or whatever service inherits this kind of bot call) not just check on the popular booking sites before placing the call?
Seriously. Instead of a single, clean restaurant reservation HTTP POST API, the future is two neural nets modulating and demodulating the request to and from inexact and potentially ambiguous English audio.
To be fair, we could make the same complaint in regards to the web - it's largely all plain-text on a line, as opposed to some form of compiled bytecode (I know, it's coming).
What we lose in using human speech for precision we make up in it being pretty much universal. Talk about an adaptable interface. You can phone the restaurant and do anything from reserving a table to ordering takeout to informing them that their cat is on fire.
(I mean that as both a joke and a real comment - you could never force every restaurent in the world to learn REST, but you sure can call a bunch of them)
Silly. The future is a stenographic handshake in the initial greeting, which negotiates an upgrade to a proprietary gRPC8 protocol when the caller and recipient are both Google, which Google uses to get a monopoly on telephone-mediated social interactions which it can then monetize by building a social graph to more efficiently target advertising to captive audiences riding Waymo cars.
I think Neal Stephenson would make the case that we started down that inefficiency road when we replaced telegraph signal with voice in the first place. ;)
I wonder if it would be able to tell if it was talking to another Duplex bot and instead of speaking in English, it would communicate more efficiently.
This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!
At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling it.
If you sequentially attack a subpopulation (e.g., employees at a company, senior citizens) the eventually news about your attack will spread throughout that network (internal security alert, evening news+daily newspapers+AARP+...). If you attack the entire subpopulation in rapid succession over the course of days or even hours, educational countermeasures become much less effective.
So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home.
Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and you see where this is going.
I meant, you could build a bot that calls. We have the technology already, and the people on the other end probably won't notice. Plus the "do it over the Internet" thing where screen scraping and scripting is super easy.
But could you build a bot that calls and is convincing enough to trick the target into actually accepting the request as genuine and reserving the timeslot?
Yes, the time commitment of having one person pickup the phone and place 100+ phone calls (and the suspicion on the other end when you call back with a new name but the same voice).
You could write a screen scraper to book online through the various booking systems, but each booking system probably has its own restrictions on how many accounts you can have and how often they can book. You skip all of these protections when you phone your reservation in (arguably, the restaurant staff should be enforcing these protections when they pick up the phone, but restaurant staff are often overworked and apathetic).
I agree it's a problem. The probably means of mitigation is for restaurants to take your credit card number when you book. Many already do this. I expect it to expand if false bookings become a problem.
This isn't that different than all the bad actors calling from the "IRS". Educating people about giving personal details out over the phone has always been a challenge and will continue to be one.
Or maybe we should fix the phone system. Something is terribly broken when my connection to YouTube is better protected and authenticated than when I'm talking to the IRS over the telephone.
You’re only ever talking to the IRS over the phone if you initiate the call. Ideally the phone system gets fixed but that’s likely to not happen any time soon. Now you need to deal with current reality. Nobody should trust that any incoming call, purportedly from a business or government, is from who they say it’s from either verbally or through caller ID.
Why stop there? Why not fix human communication? Or how about we fix human behavior so there are no bad actors? Education may be hard, but scrapping and rebuilding a century-old communication standard in use by billions is harder.
I used the IRS example because the IRS never calls you. This is only known through experience, i.e. education.
> However, there are special circumstances in which the IRS will call or come to a home or business, such as when a taxpayer has an overdue tax bill, to secure a delinquent tax return or a delinquent employment tax payment, or to tour a business as part of an audit or during criminal investigations.
So the IRS might call if you owe taxes.
Surely moving from unsecured to a secured phone system can't be that big of a deal. In the US at least, we have experience something similar when we went from analog to digital television.
Add a secured mode of telephone calls and then telephone owners choose if they want to receive calls or messages from unauthenticated callers.
Credit card companies have already solved this problem by publishing a well-known 1-800 number that their customers can call back to verify the intent of an unexpected caller.
Google Duplex can do the same thing - without even staffing a call center.
If you get a call from someone who claims to work at the credit card company you use, instead of trusting the caller (who could be a scammer) and potentially divulging private information, you should just hang up and call the number on the back of your card.
That's now how this works, that's not how any of this works. If you have ever been cold called by Google I would go change your passwords and the like.
When people talk about AI taking over, they really need to consider this route. Social engineering most of the world simultaneously. It doesn't have to build armies of robots when we'll tear everything down for it.
On Windows, there's a group policy to require Ctrl-Alt-Del before the UAC prompt asks for your password. It's impossible for an application to hijack that key combination.
Yes, which is why over time it has gotten progressively more difficult. I find some of the challenges to be almost impossible. (Also why Google started using yout session with them to bypass the captcha automatically, it would be too frustrating of an experience otherwise)
I think the biggest issue won't come from phishers, but from resellers and other occupations that are helped by automation. I could easily call every hot restaurant in San Francisco a several a day to try to snatch a table.
On the other hand, most of these places have online reservations which are already extremely gamed.
Either that, or it will train people to stop trusting a phone call as some sort of authentication. The whole social engineering problem is that when somebody gets a phone call, they trust that the person at the other end is who they say they are. Which can be a false assumption. When the robots start calling, maybe people will finally stop making that assumption automatically.
So what can you trust? The person calling you might be a simulated voice, crafted to sound like someone you know. The person texting/DMing/emailing you might be an attacker pretended to be someone you know. You can put trust in things like PGP, but they're sparsely adopted and still leave a huge attack surface.
I don't think the intention of this system is for your boss to use Google to call you and ask for passwords. It seems very limited to scheduling appointments.
Google home's speech recognition can't even reliably turn my lights on and off every time, why would I trust it to book a restaurant reservation? I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.
How does that differ from a human having the same conversation?
If I call a restaurant and say "Can I have a reservation for 6 at 8:00" and they write down a reservation for 8 at 6:00 without repeating it back I won't know until I show up at 8:00 with my 5 friends.
True -- I was mainly snarking about people with poor communication practices, not the technology (which seems great -- a godsend for people like me who hate phone communication).
> I'd expect to tell it to book a 6pm table for 2 and wind up with an 8pm table for 10.
That's a win, consider: It's the right restaurant, on the right date and 10 is larger than 2 so there'll be room enough. Ok, you have to wait two hours but given that this tiny place is normally so busy you have to book in advance what you lost in time waiting you will more than make up by the fact that you'll be the only people there expecting service.
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that Google would have one backend service or set of services for all speech to text translation, and that all related products would be powered by it. They've been iterating on speech to text interfaces for at least 15 years now.
I'm so very disappointed by google home. It feels like they left this project behind. It's infuriating how dumb this machine is, and how many times I have to repeat "ok google, hey google" for my old google home device that was working way better at the beginning. Google assistant on android also seems to work much better.
I'm with you. We've seen a demo, not a real product that people are using. I wish people would temper their expectations a bit. If product development has taught me anything, it's that it's easy to put together a demo to show how well a product can work in the golden path, but once you stray from it, it becomes incredibly difficult to solve all edge cases. With something like conversation, there are lots of edge cases that need to be handled. Once you have a missed edge case, the illusion of reliability falls apart.
The Pixelbuds were supposed to be something similar, but did not live up to the hype....and I've experienced the same things with my home automation with Google Home, and don't get me started on using it so control Spotify etc..
Exactly my thought! I appreciate Google's effort in many fields such as distributed computing but in the past few years, a lot of Google IO announcements feel like vapourware/demoware that they're going to scrap/rebuild in a few years.
There are plenty of places in my town that don't have online ordering or booking...this would (potentially) help with that...but really, I'd rather there be more tech be built around enabling theses companies to "be online" such as an online ordering or booking system. When I find a hair cut place, why can't I just book an appointment right from the Google Maps search? I'd rather have that type of convenience instead. Ironically they may add that at some point, and Duplex just calls on my behalf without me even knowing.
> Ironically they may add that at some point, and Duplex just calls on my behalf without me even knowing.
Yup, good observation; seems highly likely, save for the 'without even knowing' bit... I would imagine you'd 'request to book' and an async Duplex operation would run in the background and send you a notification of the outcome / possibilities.
I can imagine this being an extension to robots.txt - i.e. do I mind my business being robo-called, or would I rather send an API call to <x>. This is an interesting point in AI technology.
The examples they give are quite impressive but I always want to hear some examples of failures as well with these types of technology. They mention that the system is self monitoring and will try to detect a situation it can't handle and redirect to a human operator but I think some examples of situations it can't handle or where it gets things wrong would be very useful in understanding its real world robustness.
The algorithm of cause doesn't understand all contexts. What troubles me is that, in the first example, should we really give algorithm the freedom to propose a new date for an appointment? It reminds me one thing that particular bothers me with the Gmail's smart reply feature, where when given Monday or Wednesday as options, the suggested reply is, 'How about Tuesday', which does make the conversation flows, but doesn't really make any logical sense.
It makes a good demo, I am very much impressed, however, I feel it will run into a LOT of issues, even only in those provided scenarios, should those scenarios become more sophisticated.
Exactly this. I put together a rough demo of similar AI scheduling in the past and x.ai does this as well. The AI works within a given constraint before proposing new times because the idea is to free up time for you, not make you clean up a scheduling mistake every time something is decided by the AI.
Neural networks are a fundamentally statistical technique, so you find the state of the art whereever you find the largest scale. No one is operating at larger scale than Google, which has the second order effect of attracting the best talent, which then gets sorted to the highest priority problems. There are a non-trivial number of instances where Google will beat their own state of the art, and I'm quite confident they are sitting on further results to avoid a public embaressment of riches.
At last, putting the power of annoying robot phone trees in the hands of the consumer, to be directed at businesses.
For that reason alone, I'm excited. ;)
(Note: In fairness, the conversation demos are actually really slick and much better than a phone tree. I'll be interested to see how well it works in practice.)
They have listed the problems with such systems in the first paragraph. They claim to overcome these by restricting to very specific domains. But specific domains are usually still wide. A table for two, but in the garden or inside? Inside on which floor? Sometimes it doesn't matter, sometimes it does, and these things are specific and different for every business.
Really skeptical about this. And if this does become a thing, it will dumb down the interaction.
The bot can gather this restaurant specific information over several conversations with the restaurant. This wasn't possible before. This domain isn't too wide.
You are probably right that in principle one could eventually come up with a full catalog of features of a reservation. There would be about, say, 100 of those.
I seriously doubt that they will proceed to define and collect them, since those are probably 10% or less of all reservations, but lets say they would.
Then still, the conversation you make to make the reservation is a process in which you make the decision.
Say, there is a place inside at 20:00 or a place in the garden at 20:30. Are you going to let Google choose between the two options for you?
Do you imagine there would be an api in which you specify to the assistant, before it makes a call, your preferences in that much granularity?
Is any product remotely as close to this with natural-sounding human speech? Are we entering an era where all voice assistants are getting to that "Her" level in terms of human-like vocal quality?
That part is as impressive to me as the semantic parsing it's doing on that call.
Not that I've seen. The most advanced IVR systems that some banks are using have voice fingerprints and recognition etc but the TTS is still noticeably robotic.
Other companies are using huge libraries of recorded human voice for communications and concatenating them together in intelligent ways.
This is one end-game of AI - changing the economics of scams.
Imagine how a 'long con' works today: a scammer befriends a person online through a video game or social platform, and develops a rapport with them over the span of days, weeks, months. After some trust has been gained, the scammer then requests money from the victim. Does this happen a lot today? I don't know, but certainly one reason it doesn't is the economics of the scam. Who wants to spend a significant period of time gaining trust just for the chance of a payout?
AI is going to flip this on its head. Rather than dedicating hundreds of hours of a scammers time, a scammer could instead use a system like Duplex to befriend hundreds or thousands of victims simultaneously. Let it run for a few months, developing a strong rapport with the target, until the AI finally requests some money from the victim.
Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"?
Well, I'm already receiving automated calls about "that car accident" and they connect me to a real person if I happen to respond with a predefined keyword.
I would say that there's a market for that. How long before rough agents implement good AI for their operations? How long before we implement defences against AI?
> Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"?
The former (booking a table) is much more "constrained", as in the conversation would most likely not go into much of a tangent, because there are only so many responses to a statement like "book a table for four at 8pm" (8pm is full, 8pm works, etc).
Whereas asking someone how their day was would give the "victim" a much bigger breadth of responses (and additional questions!) that would cause the AI to stumble and fail to give a satisfactory answer. That, and running this 1,000 times simultaneously so that no one person would be able to intervene to "help" the AI would just be a highly unscalable operation.
And you think this is the end of innovation, this is it, no improvements from here?
Duplex is interacting with a human and that person has no idea its a computer on the other end. Yes, Duplex is limited as it stands, but what is there to make you think something as described in grandparent post won't exist in ten years?
Duplex problem is not specific tasks but limited domain. If you are engaging with a person, you are going to err on multiple domains randomly. Especially if you are building a rapport over a long period of time.
If an AI can do that, then singularity is definitively reached.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis part stuck out to me during the Google I/O demo, as an intentional deficiency is an interesting design decision.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise
Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays.
Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress; in most cases, this could be greatly improved with a bit of educated guesswork.
A completely fictitious progress bar can be extremely credible, because it's totally predictable - if you need to create a 10 second delay, then it's easy to make the bar progress linearly from 0% to 100% in that time. Users learn very quickly that your progress bar tells the truth about how long they'll be waiting, even though it's lying about the reason for the wait.
I disagree with this; I find the progress bars more credible with erratic timing. (And ideally, a display of the task currently at hand, like "Copying tiny file. Copying tiny file. Copying giant file............")
A progress bar that smoothly fills from 0 to 100 looks like an animation that somebody thought it would make you happy to watch. A progress bar that lags at 7% and then rushes the rest of the way looks like the software has some internal metric for task completion, and is reporting according to that metric. This implies that when the number changes, progress has happened, which isn't the case for a progress bar that isn't affected by workload.
The software can't use "how much time has elapsed?" as a progress metric, because it doesn't know how much time things will take, and because the passage of time does not actually cause -- or reflect -- any progress. That progress bar would be a spinner, not a progress bar.
Strongly disagree. A spinner on the web UI element that lasts longer than ~1 second indicates for me that the site's JavaScript broke again, and it's time to reload or wait for the devs to notice and fix it.
He's talking about a circular loading animation. Like the one that replaces the submit button when you're making a post on Twitter/Facebook.
(Compare the CLI spinner/fan - that "/ - \ |" animation used to indicate progress. There you know that each tick of the spinner means work has been done, because it has to be animated from code, and it's much simpler to just update it from the code that does the work.)
The spinner appears when a request is made. It disappears when the request is resolved.
For instance, I frequently deal with ATM machines that display "please wait" screens between every operation. Those screens last usually between 1 and 3 seconds, and it's obviously because the operations take that long, and totally not because they also display a half-screen or full-screen ad...
Edit: should the robot talk at 2x normal speaking speed in order to more quickly convey the necessary information? Slowing the speech down artificially so a human could easily understand it sounds like a deficiency to me. (By your definition).
When talking to real humans, I've encountered people who don't do this, and I find it makes communication difficult and frustrating.
I'm not 100% sure why I need this pause, but I know I need it. Maybe I'm considering whether my question made sense or needs corrections/additions, so that I can't focus on the answer yet. Or maybe it takes time to switch the brain from "speaking mode" to "listening mode".
At any rate, when people do this, I have to ask them to repeat the first few words they said because I didn't catch them. And the reason I didn't catch them wasn't mumbling or background noise or anything. Well-formed sounds made it to my ear just fine, but my brain wasn't ready to accept them for a fraction of a second.
well, in semantics/pragmatics these discourse particles are often not deficiencies at all. They are signals with practical semantic purpose. "hmms" and "uhs" can signal attentiveness, turn-taking (turn holding, turn yielding, etc), agreement - just to name a few.
For any machine system to be able to pass as human, it will have to be able to control these nuances or people will pick up on something being wrong, though they might not be able to articulate precisely what.
As a "non-word", it relies heavily on how it is conveyed.
Imagine someone asks you a question, I bet you can answer using just the word "uh-huh" but conveying these different emotions:
rude, perky, bored, upset, annoyed, dubious, excited
and probably a dozen more.
Even using the "perky" or "happy" one in a situation where it isn't warranted might sound rude or unthoughtful!
The speech disfluencies used by Duplex in the salon and restaurant interactions are perfect examples of why natural speech sounds natural. It's the cadence as well as the timing.
Absent the context of this conversation, it's not immediately obvious to me whether 12 PM is midday or midnight, where as "noon" is unambiguous.
20 years ago, had I said to someone "I'll be there at 12pm" it would have had a stronger implication of precision than "I'll be there at noon." I don't think it's true today.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38270/why-is-the...
All other gps guidance voices sound incredibly crude and mechanical in comparison.
Imperfection is natural and comfortable. Perfect corners and edges are artificial and weird to the distracting point.
Even though the system encodes silences noise free (so improve compression), it deliberately inserts noise because otherwise people think the line is dead.
[0]https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices
Many consider Scots to be an actual language separate from English. There's a good amount of debate about this among linguists, I think.
For anyone curious, I recommend reading these pages from the recent Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book to get a feel for how it differs from English.
https://imgur.com/gallery/wjkDp#gSO4FRW
oops!
The fact that they think it's okay to have bots pretending to be human making phone calls, shortly after demonstrating how quickly they can copy someone's voice (re: John Legend), it shows a blatant disregard for what they're creating.
"Are you a bot?" "Yes, I am Google Duplex v1.2. This call is being recorded; you can see our privacy policy and terms of service at http://google.com/duplex."
If I were to start receiving Duplex calls, and could detect it, I would report each one to the FTC.
People will be forced to "discover" that they've been lied to, when the bot is caught in a loop and they're going through emotional distress thinking the "person" on the other end is having some sort of mental breakdown.
That said, "identify on challenge" is something that Google might be more likely to adopt rather than "identify on call pickup". The latter being something they might spend more lobbyist dollars to oppose.
But what you've said is certainly (or should be) a real concern.
They explicitly say:
> We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context.
You note:
> laws against what they're doing needs to be passed.
What makes you say that robots making phone calls should be illegal? This seems an odd position to have. Do you also believe that it should be illegal for robots to clean floors? Or for your machine learning spam filter to process and filter your emails?
If I sound a little frustrated, I am. I'm scared that the future where technology allows us to do more with less will be blunted due to calls for making robot tasks illegal. I'd love if you'd help me understand what makes you take your position - I'm sure it's logical, and it's just a matter of me being able to understand your perspective. Can you help me understand?
We need to be able to trust our communication, and we're moving away from that at light speed. Where a company whose entire business model is to subtly influence you in the directions profitable to them is the middleman in all of our communications.
I am terrified of this. I am not sure I've ever seen a presentation that terrified me more that wasn't out of a science fiction movie.
Would you have the same fears if Apple were able to (through some ridiculous miracle) achieve the same thing?
I'm not sure what you're arguing for - that you wish companies weren't driving technological advancement? That Google specifically shouldn't?
Also, it's very, very conceivable that there are people for whom this technology DOES work for. The mute, for example. I'm not sure it's appropriate to speak for all of "us".
I too want to absolutely, without a doubt, regulate or slow this stuff down until we can better understand how it can be abused. And WHEN it is abused, we have ways to address it and aren't constantly playing catchup to how people are badly using these things.
Of course, I don't really see why there needs to be an attempt to pass as human at all. It would be fine with me if they just reinvented the phone tree with a better ux. Especially since it's billed as a business-facing call.
If a real problem of deep-fakes in phone conversations emerges, people will just raise the bar of authentication in phone communications. There's nothing magical about telephone that makes it exempt from the general need to protect against social engineering.
One issue though, unless we hurry up and make this WoT decentralized and with open protocols, well, we will get it from FB and the likes.
Voice copying is nothing new, many methods exists so I don't see how Google doing this is somehow bad. It's uncanny to say the least, but laws against tech progress? Come on :)
Did you think that advancing AI will be not creepy especially when it's good?
What is concerning is the surprising prevalence of technophobic notions on tech focused boards such as this.
There is something perverse about wanting to punish a company for creating something cool, and it’s certainly not the way our society or politics should function.
But at the same time, the last two years have shown us that a lot of technology is being very effectively abused to misinform at a geopolitical level, and we as a society need to better understand or regulate this stuff for sure. Lives are at stake.
That said, I'd never say that Google shouldn't work on this. It's amazing. We just need to better understand not just how it can be used, but also how it can be abused.
But it's also "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
They shouldn't've.
Furthermore, if a robocall is permitted to be made to an unsolicited destination, a robocaller must clearly identify itself, presumably starting a declaration that it is a bot/automated agent from a given company on behalf of another company or individual.
And if the call is recorded in any way, shape, or form, the terms of service would need to be presented to the callee, giving them the chance to accept or deny said terms. (Note that if the example calls at I/O were not staged, and real calls, I suspect the recording of them would be illegal in many jurisdictions, including California.)
Existing robocall law (including the National Do Not Call registry in the US) is focused around telemarketing. This isn't a telemarketing system; it's an automated assistant. I don't see the utility of applying the existing law to the new use case, as the goals are different (people at home don't want to be interrupted to be advertised at; businesses do want to negotiate business transactions).
> Furthermore, if a robocall is permitted to be made to an unsolicited destination, a robocaller must clearly identify itself, presumably starting a declaration that it is a bot/automated agent from a given company on behalf of another company or individual.
Why? If I have an assistant who makes an unsolicited call to a destination, they don't need to formally state they're acting on my behalf. What about automating the assistant's job makes it special?
I agree with you on the third point (I'm assuming Google has its bases covered there, because unilaterally recording a conversation is old and settled law).
The issue is that the intermediary is a Google corporate entity, theoretically acting on the user's behalf, but at the end of the day, acting on Google's behalf. Consider that Google's bots may do things in Google's best interests, not the best interests of the party on either side of the transaction.
As we already have assistants who transmit our desires by proxy, I don't see much difference between a human and an automated script in that context---certainly not enough difference to justify the need for special-purpose law to clarify the nature of my assistant (and definitely not enough difference to justify shutting down the technology with only vague risk and no instances of social problems introduced by the tech).
Interesting implications there for how Google will measure / improve the effectiveness of Duplex. Where is the line drawn between recording a call and recording data derived from a call? e.g. clearly recording the call unilaterally is illegal. Presumably just storing a hash of the audio data would be legal, but also useless. Is there some middle ground that is legal, but also useful?
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.
Are you going to pass laws against realistic sounding synthetic voices? Against computers that understand queries “too well”? Against self driving vehicles that drive better and safer than people? All on theoretical harm that actually hasn’t taken place because you’ve watched too many dystopian Netflix sci-fi episodes?
I don’t know what’s more dangerous, the real Skynet, or people who might harm millions by voting for political policies that inhibit real improvements that could be made to help them.
At least, if you want to talk AI being used for harmful things we could discuss feed optimization that parasitizes people’s attention spans and keeps them glued or wasting money on pulling more slot machine levers. Technology that wastes people’s time and money as opposed to things that make people more efficient.
In short, technology is a wonderful thing that allows very low marginal costs. This is what we need to make the future a better place, given a consistent or growing population.
"Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less." This is a perfect demonstration of that.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ
"A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place – Egoistic Altruism"
That's been the dream for a long time in some circles. With the enormous productivity gains and ability to leverage external energy sources (fossil fuels, solar, etc.) we could have built a society of wealth and leisure for all.
Maybe we will still. The hope is that if there is enough of a productivity gain in a short enough time period (like the introduction of AGI powered robots) that this could still happen.
When you think about it, I can download (for zero cost), a high-quality operating system and attendant applications which would have cost hundreds of dollars 20 years ago, and would have cost a fortune 40 years ago. Ditto for educational materials, entertainment, etc.
In that sense, we are quite wealthy in comparison to previous generations. If charitable organizations can leverage the automation of the future to help people, we might then see all humans across the planet lifted out of poverty.
But yeah, I don't expect corporations to do this. And it seems unlikely that most governments will either.
But sadly I think government is the only institution with the necessary leverage (tax base, mandate, etc) to accomplish this. Non-profits are also fairly dubious in their motives, subject to corruption, and generally highly inefficient. I'm not sure they're going to be our saviors either.
If you haven't worked in the NGO space, you really don't understand just how bad it is.
Nonprofits are not a magical entities. I have found most very self-serving. Self-serving the founders whims, and "pockets".
Hell even the great Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation give so little back to the womb (America) that cultured/encouraged his money making career. It's almost like the wealthy hate their family?
We saw how Bush's Thousand Points of Light went. Humans are selfish. And the lack of spirituality is just making them more so.
2. At this point, I'm just seeing so many jobs being lost to people who don't expect much (yes--there are people who don't think much about putting six people in a 10 x 12 room), and jobs lost to technology.
3. I only see two ways out, and most of you won't like it.
A. Tax the wealthy more.
During and after WW2 we were taxing Them at 90%, and they didn't complain. It takes the fear of death to lessen the drip on their wad?
B. Tie all Fees/fines to income.
We're all in this mess together.
I don't see a rosy future. I just see more homeless.
The wealthy realized they don't need their family (America). They have the world to sell, and exploit to.
I got off track, but don't see nonprofits curing our problems.
I would add however that there does appear to be some barrier limiting the ability of ordinary people to accumulate financial capital, and I attribute that to friction/fixed-costs imposed by regulations.
New services, like Robinhood, and technology, like cryptocurrency, could address this, and allow wider participation in capital markets.
Yes the rich have it better, but the poor also have improved in ways that the rich of 200 years ago couldn't imagine.
The problem is the relatively imminent (next 50-100 years) reality of nearly complete human obsolescence. That's when you'll see societal degradation at previously unthinkable levels. And no that's not Luddite fallacy. The next epoch of technological innovation is going to be unlike any that came before.
A lot of people champion UBI, while forgetting that something like 3B+ people currently live on less than $2.50 a day. That's really all the evidence you need to know that the future is going to be pretty grim. Do we think it's more likely that plutocratic systems will award sustainable UBI packages to the mass unemployed via wealth transfer (which is anathema in said systems) or that market forces will discover the absolute minimum survivable income level and create new strata in first-world societies that hover just above pure barbarism?
I'm sorry but given historical context and popular capitalist intent, this future you speak of is simply fantastical. The working class would sooner be made extinct before a Jetsons-esque future of leisure for all came to fruition.
Taken to its logical extreme, there is no wage whatsoever if a majority of jobs are automated.
As for jobs, most of those that existed 200 years ago no longer exist or employ a tiny fraction of people they employed at that time, yet we don't have mass unemployment. Automation has never had a broad-based negative impact on the demand for labor. Its effect has been exactly the opposite.
20% of all jobs will be lost to self-driving cars
25% of all jobs will be lost to automated customer support/marketing/non-direct human interaction
10% of all jobs will be lost to automating away all middlemen
5% of all jobs will be lost to automating away rudimentary programming
Now, who is going to win here?
What we lose in using human speech for precision we make up in it being pretty much universal. Talk about an adaptable interface. You can phone the restaurant and do anything from reserving a table to ordering takeout to informing them that their cat is on fire.
(I mean that as both a joke and a real comment - you could never force every restaurent in the world to learn REST, but you sure can call a bunch of them)
https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
If you sequentially attack a subpopulation (e.g., employees at a company, senior citizens) the eventually news about your attack will spread throughout that network (internal security alert, evening news+daily newspapers+AARP+...). If you attack the entire subpopulation in rapid succession over the course of days or even hours, educational countermeasures become much less effective.
Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and you see where this is going.
You could write a screen scraper to book online through the various booking systems, but each booking system probably has its own restrictions on how many accounts you can have and how often they can book. You skip all of these protections when you phone your reservation in (arguably, the restaurant staff should be enforcing these protections when they pick up the phone, but restaurant staff are often overworked and apathetic).
I used the IRS example because the IRS never calls you. This is only known through experience, i.e. education.
> However, there are special circumstances in which the IRS will call or come to a home or business, such as when a taxpayer has an overdue tax bill, to secure a delinquent tax return or a delinquent employment tax payment, or to tour a business as part of an audit or during criminal investigations.
So the IRS might call if you owe taxes.
Surely moving from unsecured to a secured phone system can't be that big of a deal. In the US at least, we have experience something similar when we went from analog to digital television.
Add a secured mode of telephone calls and then telephone owners choose if they want to receive calls or messages from unauthenticated callers.
Google Duplex can do the same thing - without even staffing a call center.
If you can automate it, your response rate only needs to be, what, like people clicking on spam? Tiny.
The days of trusting meat sacks with important information might be numbered.
Someone should make the dystopia where Skynet doesn't build terminators, but call centers.
Have you ever wondered the same thing about your favorite OS’s admin credentials dialog? What if an app spoofs it?
On the other hand, most of these places have online reservations which are already extremely gamed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/your-money/robocalls-rise...
Who want google to spy in they life ?
If I call a restaurant and say "Can I have a reservation for 6 at 8:00" and they write down a reservation for 8 at 6:00 without repeating it back I won't know until I show up at 8:00 with my 5 friends.
I'm afraid I foresee this whole thing going quite hilariously wrong on the order of magnitude of Microsoft's Tay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
That's a win, consider: It's the right restaurant, on the right date and 10 is larger than 2 so there'll be room enough. Ok, you have to wait two hours but given that this tiny place is normally so busy you have to book in advance what you lost in time waiting you will more than make up by the fact that you'll be the only people there expecting service.
Yup, good observation; seems highly likely, save for the 'without even knowing' bit... I would imagine you'd 'request to book' and an async Duplex operation would run in the background and send you a notification of the outcome / possibilities.
How bout: "Hey Duplex, call this support number and get a top level human manager on the line please."
Then we get a HN article: "Duplex is fighting Alexa!"
This must be the most convoluted API protocol ever invented.
The algorithm of cause doesn't understand all contexts. What troubles me is that, in the first example, should we really give algorithm the freedom to propose a new date for an appointment? It reminds me one thing that particular bothers me with the Gmail's smart reply feature, where when given Monday or Wednesday as options, the suggested reply is, 'How about Tuesday', which does make the conversation flows, but doesn't really make any logical sense.
It makes a good demo, I am very much impressed, however, I feel it will run into a LOT of issues, even only in those provided scenarios, should those scenarios become more sophisticated.
Lenny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgT44DuIaAM&list=PLduL71_GKz...
Jolly Roger: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3OxCWLEmoIhNMm-hnvBm9Q
For that reason alone, I'm excited. ;)
(Note: In fairness, the conversation demos are actually really slick and much better than a phone tree. I'll be interested to see how well it works in practice.)
Really skeptical about this. And if this does become a thing, it will dumb down the interaction.
I seriously doubt that they will proceed to define and collect them, since those are probably 10% or less of all reservations, but lets say they would.
Then still, the conversation you make to make the reservation is a process in which you make the decision.
Say, there is a place inside at 20:00 or a place in the garden at 20:30. Are you going to let Google choose between the two options for you?
Do you imagine there would be an api in which you specify to the assistant, before it makes a call, your preferences in that much granularity?
That part is as impressive to me as the semantic parsing it's doing on that call.
Other companies are using huge libraries of recorded human voice for communications and concatenating them together in intelligent ways.
Imagine how a 'long con' works today: a scammer befriends a person online through a video game or social platform, and develops a rapport with them over the span of days, weeks, months. After some trust has been gained, the scammer then requests money from the victim. Does this happen a lot today? I don't know, but certainly one reason it doesn't is the economics of the scam. Who wants to spend a significant period of time gaining trust just for the chance of a payout?
AI is going to flip this on its head. Rather than dedicating hundreds of hours of a scammers time, a scammer could instead use a system like Duplex to befriend hundreds or thousands of victims simultaneously. Let it run for a few months, developing a strong rapport with the target, until the AI finally requests some money from the victim.
Yes, duplex is for completing specific tasks, but how much of a difference is there between "Duplex, book a table for four at 8pm" and "Duplex, ask my victim about how their day was"?
I would say that there's a market for that. How long before rough agents implement good AI for their operations? How long before we implement defences against AI?
The former (booking a table) is much more "constrained", as in the conversation would most likely not go into much of a tangent, because there are only so many responses to a statement like "book a table for four at 8pm" (8pm is full, 8pm works, etc).
Whereas asking someone how their day was would give the "victim" a much bigger breadth of responses (and additional questions!) that would cause the AI to stumble and fail to give a satisfactory answer. That, and running this 1,000 times simultaneously so that no one person would be able to intervene to "help" the AI would just be a highly unscalable operation.
So yes, huge difference.
Duplex is interacting with a human and that person has no idea its a computer on the other end. Yes, Duplex is limited as it stands, but what is there to make you think something as described in grandparent post won't exist in ten years?
In terms of NLP, the Duplex seems hardly that much of a jump. The main improvements seem to be on the speech part.
If an AI can do that, then singularity is definitively reached.