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Meghan (she/her)
Meghan (she/her)

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Google Duplex: Has AI Gone Too Far?

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

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miguelqueiroz profile image
Miguel Queiroz

I believe that AI voice is pre recorded/ or samples of pre recorded words/sentenses. I dont believe its true AI voice there, sorry I don't buy it...
Otherwise why not having those voices already available on our google assistants?

On the other hand, there is no need to be afraid of fake booking because the person booking will have to pre pay the appointment eventually... So.. for the salon it does not matter if its fake or not if it received the money anyway...

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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

The article clearly says that the AI is trained just for a very small set of scenarios:

One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.

I don't think they are lying, it would be a very bad business move ;-)

It will take a long time before we'll have it on our phones, there are too many nuances. Booking a meal is not the same as booking a doctor's appointment for example. And they also have to deal with all the languages we speak.

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

No, @miguelqueiroz is right. These are not (entirely) synthesized voices. I don't buy it either. +1 for noticing that, Miguel. :)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

I'm not sure I get your point.

Either Google is lying on the world stage which though not impossible is highly unlikely or I'm not sure what you're trying to say

Either way we can't prove at which stage of development the technology is, in the meantime we're going to get John Legend's voice in the assistant techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/google-a...

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miguelqueiroz profile image
Miguel Queiroz

They don't say in the talk that the voice you hear is AI, they just shown what they wanted it to look like, or what they vision to do. I guess..

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Ok so you think they just showed us the end goal instead of what the actual technology can do right now? Well, I think we'll never know then :-)

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faizanhussainrabbani profile image
Faizan Hussain Rabbani

I don't think the demo was scripted. It was true, because CEO said it couple of times that they have several recordings like these that they would like to show.

Google Duplex is in advanced stages of development and we might be able to experience it in 2-3 years.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Another post on the subject:

With a few comments relevant here

I would say yes. Having a quick discussion with my brother about it I came up with the scenario of the Google AI being used to call businesses constantly to set up fake appointments.

A simple solution to this is to make the AI start the conversation like "Hi, this is Google Assistant calling on behalf of Joe Smith, I would like to make an appointment for him please".

Human on the other side knows it's an AI and can answer accordingly. Doesn't need to pretend to do formalities, can simply state fact. Both efficient and fair to the person on the otherside.

I also would say it is important for AI to be as humanised as possible, as we can all agree standard computer voices are annoying and most people would just hangup.

An AI / Assistant accepting voice as an input seems quite acceptable. It should have a "trigger word" (IE, "Alexa," or "Hey Google"), and otherwise clear it's memory of the sounds around it. We've gotten pretty

Voice as an output is way more ethically grey in my mind. I would agree with @scottishross that a disclaimer would be appropriate in these situations.

What happens when the AI gets confused and the conversation leaves it's pre-determined bounds? Without a disclaimer, things could get very crazy.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

At the end of the video he asks "how far are we willing to go with these robot assistants?". We all know the answer to that question :-D

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jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

They make incredibly real looking ones in Japan and South Korea.

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

I sure think so..