![]() What prompted much of the suspicion here is that nobody who answers the calls from the Assistant in Google’s samples identifies their name or the name of the business. Sadly, the rest of Google’s audio samples don’t contain any other clues as to which restaurants were called. We called Hongs Gourmet last night, but the person who answered the phone referred us to her manager, who she told us had left for the day. In the blog post, Google Duplex lead Yaniv Leviathan and engineering manager Matan Kalman posted a picture of themselves eating a meal “booked through a call from Duplex.” Thanks to the wonder of crowdsourcing and a number of intrepid sleuths, we know that this restaurant was Hongs Gourmet in Saratoga, California. So on top of the ethics questions, there are also a few legal questions here. California is a two-consent state, so our understanding is that permission to record these calls would have been necessary (unless those calls were made to businesses in a state with different laws). ![]() Google has so far declined to disclose the name of the businesses it worked with and whether it had permission to record those calls. The company made the same claims in a blog post (“While sounding natural, these and other examples are conversations between a fully automatic computer system and real businesses.”). So did Google fudge this demo? Here is why people are asking and what we know so far:ĭuring his keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted multiple times that we were listening to real calls and real conversations (“What you will hear is the Google Assistant actually calling a real salon.”). If you haven’t seen the demo, take a look at this before you read on. As far as I can tell, the same is true for other outlets that have contacted the company. We have reached out to Google with a number of very specific questions about this and have not heard back. Over the course of the last few days, those were joined by questions from people like writer John Gruber about whether the demo was staged or edited. Axios then asked Google a few simple questions about the demo that Google has refused to answer. That demo drew lots of laughs at the keynote, but after the dust settled, plenty of ethical questions popped up because of how Duplex tries to fake being human. The Google Duplex system is invariably the next step in the journey to symbiosis between man and machine that our future will no doubt embody.The highlight of Google’s I/O keynote earlier this month was the reveal of Duplex, a system that can make calls to set up a salon appointment or a restaurant reservation for you by calling those places, chatting with a human and getting the job done. While such ethical questions are part and parcel of any advancements in robotics and AI, one thing is very clear. However, as soon as the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai played a demo at the Google I/O 2018 keynote address, some questions were raised about the very human voice emulated by the system, most notably whether its life-like voice would create false impressions on those humans it’s set to interact with. The tech innovator has positioned Google Duplex to help the roughly 60 percent of small business with no access to automated systems gain entry to its massive user base. Thanks to cutting-edge developments in AI and voice recognition technology, it will allegedly enable your gadget to set up appointments on your behalf, be it a restaurant reservation or a session with your hairdresser. And now, Google has apparently pushed the boundaries even further with its recently-unveiled Google Duplex system.įor the uninitiated, Duplex was created as a planned future add-on to the Google Assistant’s already-expansive bag of tricks. ![]() As we highlighted in our in-depth AI feature, it has become an inherent part of our day-to-day lives, be it through smartphones, home and office security, credit card safety and so forth. Continual and unrelenting advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become the norm rather than the exception these days. ![]()
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