My impression is Google's lawyers are not dumb enough to let Google publicly announce they're illegally recording calls in a two-party consent state: Presumably their demos were recorded with permission or staged.
But I was definitely curious how they could operate Duplex without running afoul of existing laws. It's possible Google believes they are not "recording" the call when they send audio to and from their AI.
They may be transcribing calls to text, which arguably isn't "call recording", it is just writing down verbatim what was said in the call. They likely have enough voice data from other sources, like Google Assistant on people's phones and Google Home that they can avoid recording calls explicitly.
>>Google publicly announce they're illegally recording calls in a two-party consent state
Why wouldn't they just run these tests in a one-party consent jurisdiction? From a quick google only 12 states are two-party. Nothing about the demo indicated to me it was done in California.
Even if it's a one-party state, that does not make allowances for eavesdropping, which is what Google would be guilty of if they're recording your phone calls.
The one-party and two-party rules ONLY applies to active participants in the call. The laws are meant to protect callers and receivers of calls from eavesdropping. There is a presumption especially in one-party states that if you're a participant in a call or conversation you have a god-given right to record it for later review.
The FBI can't do it, the NSA can't do it, the CIA can't do it, the phone companies can't do it, you better believe freaking Google can't do it.
(slightly on-topic and valuable all the same, there are several excellent free apps to record all your calls on smartphones. This is the single greatest feature of a smartphone.)
And also all of the time people talk to Google Home, Assistant, etc. Google Voice voicemails, and perhaps calls? Also, all of the audio and any recorded calls posted to YouTube.
They have all the youtube data plus millions of calls they could buy from call-centers to train if that's not enough, I doubt they need to resort to record calls.
19 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadBut I was definitely curious how they could operate Duplex without running afoul of existing laws. It's possible Google believes they are not "recording" the call when they send audio to and from their AI.
They may be transcribing calls to text, which arguably isn't "call recording", it is just writing down verbatim what was said in the call. They likely have enough voice data from other sources, like Google Assistant on people's phones and Google Home that they can avoid recording calls explicitly.
Why wouldn't they just run these tests in a one-party consent jurisdiction? From a quick google only 12 states are two-party. Nothing about the demo indicated to me it was done in California.
The one-party and two-party rules ONLY applies to active participants in the call. The laws are meant to protect callers and receivers of calls from eavesdropping. There is a presumption especially in one-party states that if you're a participant in a call or conversation you have a god-given right to record it for later review.
The FBI can't do it, the NSA can't do it, the CIA can't do it, the phone companies can't do it, you better believe freaking Google can't do it.
(slightly on-topic and valuable all the same, there are several excellent free apps to record all your calls on smartphones. This is the single greatest feature of a smartphone.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411
And also all of the time people talk to Google Home, Assistant, etc. Google Voice voicemails, and perhaps calls? Also, all of the audio and any recorded calls posted to YouTube.
https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/enhanced-models