<story><title>Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone</title><url>https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freyir</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.</text></item><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is.&lt;p&gt;People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases.&lt;p&gt;In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot following a repetitive script.&lt;p&gt;Duplex seems trained against this corpus. The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.&lt;p&gt;Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls, so I think the reverse of this duplex system, a more natural voice booking system for small businesses would help the immensely free up their workers to focus on customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZainRiz</author><text>Lol, but if you think about it, what stops businesses from doing this today?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the lack of a universal API.&lt;p&gt;If a barber shop wants to make it possible for a 3rd party app to book appointments then they have to release some API.  But that&amp;#x27;s not the end of it. The 3rd party app has to first discover their Api, someone has to understand it and write code to use it, and then deploy that code.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;This is a problem today because there is no universal Api that all services can use&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;With Duplex, verbals speech becomes a universal Api that every service can parse and communicate to each other wtih. Also, the discoverability is taken care of by using publicly cataloged phone numbers on services like Google Maps, Yelp, etc</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone</title><url>https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freyir</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And looking even further into the future, we can imagine a day when the computers forgo natural speech and use a better-suited form of communication. Some kind of sequence of ones and zeros transmitted directly across the wire.</text></item><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>The people losing their marbles over this being some kind of Turing Test passing distopian stuff are missing the point at how limited this domain is.&lt;p&gt;People who answer phones to take bookings perform an extremely limited set of questions and responses, that’s why they can even be replaced by dumb voice response systems in many cases.&lt;p&gt;In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot following a repetitive script.&lt;p&gt;Duplex seems trained against this corpus. The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.&lt;p&gt;Most people working in hair salons or restaurants are very busy with customers and don’t want to handle these calls, so I think the reverse of this duplex system, a more natural voice booking system for small businesses would help the immensely free up their workers to focus on customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stfwn</author><text>A large part of introducing new tech is enabling the transition from existing tech. Maybe if we scrapped all old cars and allowed only autonomously vehicles we’d be be sleeping at 120 km&amp;#x2F;h next week. But some businesses still run on COBOL.</text></comment>