Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
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.<p>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.<p>In these cases, the human being answering the phone is themselves acting like a bot following a repetitive script.<p>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.<p>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.