
No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself - lleddell
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-duplex-stealing-voices,37031.html
======
Zanni
I like to be clear on whether I'm interacting with a human or a bot because
different social conventions apply. If you're human, I'll treat you like one,
and that means giving you some consideration at the expense of expediency. If
you're a bot, let's just cut to the fucking chase. So a bot that acts like a
human (with hems and haws) is just wasting my time. Ditto a human being that
has been reduced to a bot by following a script.

~~~
gyom
I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at
Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the
subjects believe that they were interacting with another person via a
computer, when in fact they were interacting with a program (makes everything
more standard and easier to analyse).

One day he participated in this "split or share" kind of experiment, and he
was ruthless. Nobody's emotions would be damaged by acting nasty and never
sharing with the computer program.

Turns out, it probably was actually a real person who was behind on the other
side. He saw some old woman crying, coming out of some adjacent room after the
experiment was over.

So, yeah, different social conventions definitely apply.

~~~
hosh
There's the reverse where, what if AIs do develop feelings like that? Why
shouldn't they be treated with the courtesy we treat other humans?

Just thought of these:

\- Would this kind of personal assisstant be useful for people on the autism
spectrum, to help navigate the kind of implied and unspoken narratives that
people with autism seem to have difficulty with?

\- Would there be a call to train Duplex to speak in a way that is more
comfortable for people on the spectrum?

\- Or any of the neurodivergent tribes for that matter?

~~~
freehunter
I've said this before, but in reality strong AI will be another species. Every
species of any moderate intelligence is expected to be treated with some
courtesy and respect, but their social norms are far different from that of a
human and we tailor our interactions with them in different ways. If I'm
chewing gum and a human sees me, I might offer them a piece too. I'd never do
that to a dog, no matter how much the dog wanted me to. If I saw a human
chewing on the grass, I might stop them and ask them some questions to see if
they're okay or need medical attention. If I saw a rabbit doing it, I might
take a picture because it's cute, but I'd leave it alone (unless it was in my
vegetable garden).

There is no reason to expect that strong AI will share the exact same feelings
we do unless someone explicitly programs it to (which would be a mistake). Any
truly emergent emotional behavior on the part of an AI would be very likely to
differ substantially from ours. Making a chatbot "sad" is not the same as
making a sapient (or even sentient) being sad. If AI ever achieves sentience,
we're going to have to learn what makes it uniquely happy and sad.

~~~
hosh
Sure. There is also the reflection: how we think about and treat AI, or any
other sentient species speak as muc about how we understand what it is to be
human.

------
cromwellian
The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't
even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it
seems a lot of instant messaging boils down to pictures, emoji, memes, and
short responses ("I'll be there at XXX")

The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of
laziness or cost/benefit.

Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary
people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time:
administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up
an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber
powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person
out of the message.

We could argue whether or not everyone getting their own AI admin assistant is
good or bad for society (will everyone just have their assistants talk to each
other, and no one will talk directly anymore?) But I must admit, I hate
dealing with non-friends/family in communications that involve transactions.
There's nothing I hate more than having to book stuff, call customer service,
or write emails to service departments.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary
people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time:
administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up
an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber
powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person
out of the message.

>We could argue whether or not everyone getting their own AI admin assistant
is good or bad for society (will everyone just have their assistants talk to
each other, and no one will talk directly anymore?) But I must admit, I hate
dealing with non-friends/family in communications that involve transactions.
There's nothing I hate more than having to book stuff, call customer service,
or write emails to service departments.

The thing is, if I had to point to a problem I have in life and for which I'd
be willing to pay for a solution, a lack of a secretary and excessive personal
admin stuff is simply not it. This is solving a problem that, at least to my
eyes, only the powerful actually have.

~~~
brightball
The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of
about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full
time, we needed child care.

It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to
daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one.

That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that
we ever had. She did a load of laundry and a load of dishes each day while the
kids were having naps. If we were low on detergent or supplies that the kids
needed, we gave her cash and she'd pick it up on her way in. If somebody
needed to be at the house for some reason, she was there and neither my wife
nor I had to remove ourselves from work to take care of it.

We literally came home from work, ate dinner, played with the kids. When the
weekends came around we didn't have to dedicate a chunk of it to
laundry/cleaning.

It was pretty fantastic.

I can only imagine how having a actual assistant would take things to the next
level.

All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making
here aren't that beneficial...yet.

When Google can call my cable company, wade through the phone tree and get a
service appointment or issue resolved...I'll be all over it. Even just wading
through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached
and then handing it back off to me.

Those are the time wasters I'd want saved. What Google is doing here is
equivalent of automating the functionality that people pay for with OnStar.

~~~
kolpa
I'm curious where you live. In my area, a "nanny" is exclusively or childcare
(and well paid, including Social Security and Unemployment premiums), with no
meal prep or laundry. We "cleaned the house for the nanny" to avoid
embarrassment. Honestly it felt more like we were charitable sponsors to an
underemployed youth (in exchange for having someone fulfill the obligation of
keeping the toddler accompanied) than we were hiring an employee.

It's a far cry from the do-everything (and possibly cash-under-the-table)
servant help I've seen in the past/elsewhere.

~~~
brightball
We started out with childcare only and then after she'd been there for about a
month offered a $2 / hr increase if she was up for the load of laundry +
dishes.

I live in the Greenville, SC area and we went through a local screening and
hiring service here that also helps people find baby sitters.

------
wilsonnb
I see their point about "your" voice being sucked out of your emails if you
use autocomplete for 90% of them.

I don't really care about that though. Most people I know have moved on from
using email for personal communication and only use it for business. In that
situation, I don't really care if my email sounds like me or not. It's just
performing a function. It's not a creative expression. It's not any different
than Visual Studio completing a line of overly verbose C# for me.

~~~
gyom
> Most people I know have moved on from using email for personal communication
> and only use it for business.

That experience completely differs from mine. Maybe I just prefer email to
text or Facebook messages, but the same principle applies to wherever you are
writing something to friend or family. Wouldn't you get the same problem, just
elsewhere?

Responding to my mother's birthday wishes does seem like it's a different kind
of activity than autocompleting C# code, even though both can be executed with
autocomplete to get a good valid output.

~~~
wilsonnb
I would gladly use it for _most_ communication. Probably not for my spouse but
for everyone else.

I am not a good representative for how the average person feels about using it
for personal messaging, though. I can see why many people would be against it
for that.

------
vermontdevil
The use case for Duplex could be tremendous for people like me (deaf etc)
depending on the implementation/rollout. Too many times I’m unable to interact
with remote banks because they refuse to accept my calls through relay
services. Right now I’m completely locked out of USAA despite the fact I’ve
been a customer of them since the 70s. It’s forced me to have accounts with
local banks in case I have to appear in person.

I don’t know if this tech will help me in the future but am looking forward to
the possibilities.

------
fenwick67
I'm more worried about autocomplete doing things like...

Let's get together for [some tacos at Chipotle™️]

or

I could really use [an ice cold Coke™️ right now]

~~~
sli
There was a short time when Swiftkey was suggesting a worrying number of
copyrighted brand names to me. Enough that I noticed it was doing it far more
then usual (which previously was somewhere between never and almost never). It
stopped within a week, but that was a little uncomfortable.

------
viridian
I find myself surprisingly agreeing with this article. The "everyone's voice
begins to sound the same" aspect of it is something I hadn't even considered,
and does feel a little bit unnerving to me. Maybe unnerving isn't even the
right word, but I can't think of a more appropriate one. Luckily though, soon
I'll be able to ask google for the correct one.

~~~
wool_gather
I agree as well, but only in part -- there's a big difference between the
email suggestions and the voice assistant.

The email is _as if_ coming directly from you. It's got your name signed on to
it. The argument that your voice may be distorted rings true here.

When your phone is making calls on your behalf, it's not literally calling up
and saying, "Hi, my name is ${USERNAME}, I'd like to book a spa" It represents
itself as another person, doing something on your behalf. (The assistant in
the example call asked to book an appointment _" for my client"_.)

------
stcredzero
I've had autocomplete seem to deliberately try to break me up with my
girlfriend. I don't have time to dig up the most egregious of those. Here's
one that happened just yesterday with my wife:

    
    
        Wife: Thank you. Love you too.
        Me: Are you going to be honest nary?
        Me: Hungry
        Me: Darn spell check!
    

My wife, having grown up in China, still didn't understand and I had some
'splainin to do when I got home.

It's absolutely terrible when I've typed exactly what I want, but then the
autocorrect substitution happens just before I press send. There's something
that seems infuriatingly patronizing about this.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Remember this story?

A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

[https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-
tw...](https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two-people-
puts-three-more-in-jail)

~~~
emodendroket
No, but I remember this one, where a court determined "give me a lawyer dog"
meant "give me a lawyer-dog" rather than "give me a lawyer, dog"
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
crime/wp/2017/11/02...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
crime/wp/2017/11/02/the-suspect-told-police-give-me-a-lawyer-dog-the-court-
says-he-wasnt-asking-for-a-lawyer/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5d536fa55673)

~~~
kolpa
That article is almost certainly wrong, or at least misleading.

The question at hand was whether this statement was a direct request for a
counsel, or just chatter.

"This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so
why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.”

The court decided " (agreeing with the lower courts’ conclusion that the 1 2
statement “[m]aybe I should talk to a lawyer” is not an unambiguous request
for a lawyer). In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference
to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel". There's a
little bit of cultural bias in the "dog" part, but the main thrust is that the
defendant didn't make a clear statement of invocation.

IMO the law as it stands is horrid -- legal representation should be the
default unless explicitly waived, not the reverse, but under the current law
the decision turned on whether that statements was a _demand_ for a lawyer or
merely a suggestion.

[http://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdfrt](http://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdfrt)

~~~
emodendroket
I don't understand your objection. As you've quoted, from that decision, the
judgment refers to an "ambiguous and equivocal reference to a 'lawyer dog,'"
which pretty plainly suggests that the judge has deemed "lawyer-dog" a lexical
unit rather than interpreting "dog" as a sobriquet. At best you could say it
was only part of his reasoning; either way, in my mind, it goes beyond
cultural bias to be a patently absurd reading.

------
vpmpaul
I've noticed one thing about this feature. If a person can be responded to
using this feature they don't matter. They are just some time waster
bureaucrat,salesman,ect. Its actually a good feature for those of us doing
real(ish?) work.

~~~
Analemma_
I mean, everyone realized right away that the only reason this exists is for
businesses which, for whatever reason, haven't yet created an API to do
bookings. So that was sort of implied from the beginning.

------
randomsearch
Things this technology will not be good at:

\- making reservations etc on your behalf

Things this technology will be good at:

\- automatically calling lots of businesses and individuals to extract data
from them: from opening hours to voting preferences, scam calls to political
campaigning with personalised campaign messages, large-scale cold call
automated advertising, crowd sourcing information, surveys, and the most
profitable - replacing call centres and firing staff.

I assume Google are well aware of this...

~~~
craftyguy
This technology is literally a phone scammer's/spammer's wet dream.

~~~
Sylos
That's probably my favorite part about being a tech person. When non-techies
ask you what JavaScript in Excel is useful for, and you can respond in the
dryest of ways "Primarily malware".

And then they look at you like "But you're the tech person, you never think
that technology is stupid".

Which it isn't, just some companies behind it really fucking are.

------
51Cards
What I don't see many people commenting on is how this benefits small
business. My barber, my Dr., my mechanic, my favorite restaurants, etc. are
all small "shops". They don't have online booking nor do they want it. They
answer phones and this allows clients to interact easier with them and it
requires Zero investment for the small business. This is technology adapting
to a communication hole IMO and I think it's quite a positive thing.

~~~
arbie
Absolutely. It is a great example of a digital interface to a stubbornly
analog world.

------
TangoTrotFox
On top of individual expression, I'm also curious what the longterm effect of
all of these 'handy tools' is going to be on our cognitive abilities. There
was study from Microsoft indicating that our average attention span has
decreased some 33% just since 2000. And 'Google Brain' \- where individuals
have ever increasing difficulty recalling information, instead supplanted with
where to find things, has also been academically confirmed. [1]

These are some pretty serious effects for things that are less than a 2
decades old. And it's likely that we've only scratched the surface of
conveniences to come. I'm not sure if we're headed towards the Borg (or more
accurately the Bynars for any other TNG fans) or Idiocracy.

[1] -
[http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/sparrow_et_al...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/sparrow_et_al._2011.pdf)

------
pgodzin
You can easily opt-out of the auto-complete feature and if it being your own
words with your own personality is important to you, then you likely will
actually type them rather than autocomplete to the close-enough response
Google suggested.

Seems like plenty of people are happy with this trade-off, and that's who the
feature is for.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The problem is it affects two way communication. You might be okay with the
trade off, I am not. But you may subject me to it.

While a few niche businesses will make news stating they'll reject robo call
based appointment scheduling because they care about their actual human
employees, most will just accept it. The employees won't have a choice and
will just be subjected to this.

Same for email. I want to hear from people, not Google. I'm perfectly content
just purging people out of my contacts who let Google do the talking.

~~~
pgodzin
What are they being "subjected" to? Presumably the conversation will go
similarly to how it would with a person? We aren't talking about spam calls,
just a difference of who does the talking. This will increase business for
places where people wouldn't want to go through the effort of calling
themselves.

For email how will you know if I auto-completed my sentence or typed it? You
are free to not use the feature, and as someone talking to you I am able to
use it to save time writing an email if I find the suggestions in line with
what I wanted to say.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I suspect people who made Comcast's telephone system had exactly the same
notion. Feel free to experience it yourself at 1-800-COMCAST.

~~~
pgodzin
I suspect they didn't - Google's notion is a human-like conversation with a
real person to accomplish a simple goal on the user's behalf. Comcast's notion
is to make it as hard as possible for a user to accomplish their goal
(cancelling, switching, complaining).

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is an unfortunate trend I continue to see: Where a company with a
positive reputation, say Google, is given the most altruistic read on what
their decision is for, and a company with a negative reputation, like Comcast,
is assumed to be evil.

Many people's issues are, in fact, solved by the Comcast automated system.
Generally if you call in to report an outage, and it knows that there's an
outage associated with your area already based on the phone number you call
from, it'll drop you out of the tech support queue, let you know that the
outage is there, and what time it is expected to be resolved. This is the most
common reason I call Comcast, and most of the time, it's an outage they
already knew about, so this saves me time. (Of course, the times the line just
to my building was severed, getting to an actual human to explain my problem
is much, much harder.)

Similarly, all of the automated features to trigger remote resets of your
modem have been implemented specifically so that if you have a simple problem
(as most people do), you can get it quickly and automatically resolved without
having to wait for an available human. I know how to reset my own dang modem,
so this just adds another burdensome and annoying step for me... but for the
average user, it's probably wildly successful at concluding calls. I assume.

But sometimes, when you or I call, we probably have more specific or detailed
needs, and find this entire process absolutely horrific to suffer through. But
surely, just like the Googlers who thought Duplex was a good idea, someone at
Comcast realized it would drastically reduce call volume and speed response
time if an automated system could do simple tasks automatically.

Similarly, Duplex will probably do it's job: It'll make it easier for people
who don't want to be bothered to make a phone call to schedule an appointment.
It'll reduce their call volume. But the humans who have to interface with it
will likely find it exasperating.

~~~
pgodzin
And certainly that's not the "feature" of Comcast support you were referring
to when you directed me there. Most people's negative notions of Comcast and
their support is well-deserved.

Until Google makes Duplex an "exasperating" experience I have no issues giving
them the benefit of the doubt. The way it was presented, there is nothing
exasperating about it - assuming it is ready to be released it'll be the
equivalent of a common, simple human conversation now (maybe with fewer angry
callers), and plenty of small business will love having more reservations made

------
fortythirteen
"Let us tell you what's newsworthy and what isn't."

"Let us direct your searches through filtered autocomplete and 'curate' your
search results."

"Let us filter out any 'controversial' content, so you won't have to question
y(our) worldview."

"Let us make phone calls for you, so you don't have to maintain social skills
by interacting with other humans."

"Let us finish your thoughts for you, because, by this point, you don't have
any of your own."

------
milesf
Yeah, the telemarketing people who clog up the phone lines and interrupt
dinner times all over the planet won't see the benefit of this at all
</sarcasm>

------
rafiki6
Not sure why the reaction to this is so negative. Google's own AI blog
([https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-
natur...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-
conversation.html)) admits that this is a very specific use case system. And
it seems to be more of an engineering feat than an actual "AI" or even "ML"
accomplishment. Basically this is the result of a very well trained system by
a bunch of HUMANS. The bots aren't here for us yet folks, take a chill pill.
If Google wants to create a bunch of task specific conversational bots to bake
into their already excellent voice assistant, why not?

------
aestetix
For reasons that I suspect are now obvious, I pretty much hate all the tech
coming out of the Google/Facebook/Twitter complex. If you need to ask why, I
suggest asking them why they don't comply with GDPR.

However, there is one fantastic use case I can see for Google Duplex, the
service that makes phone calls for you: dealing with health insurance
companies.

If this AI is half as good as they claim.... does that mean it can call into
your health insurance company, wait on hold for two hours, and then spend
another hour arguing with the rep who is trying to deny your claim, including
waiting on hold, and correcting them on incorrect details and making sure they
don't lie to you about their policies? Because that would be amazing.

~~~
dawnerd
Alternately calling up frontier/other isps and automatically correcting
billing mistakes.

------
emodendroket
It's bizarre to me that _this_ is the red line for everybody.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It is _a_ red line, not _the_ red line.

For a while I've felt like the solution was that _I_ needed to be detached
from Google products and services (along with similar data-driven companies),
and that was good enough.

I feel like we're rapidly approaching the territory where I need to make sure
_nobody I talk to_ is attached to Google products and services. I feel like
this is line we're crossing now, where Google has inserted itself directly
between the people I want to communicate with and myself, and is changing (or
generating) that content directly.

~~~
emodendroket
What makes it so different from canned text messages?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The worst I've seen there is the sort of shortcut when your phone rings to
automatically say you can't talk at the moment. It's not the same as having
custom canned messages written even on a desktop client.

~~~
emodendroket
I have an Android Wear watch and it offers a menu of canned responses to
messages that I make pretty good use of.

Gmail has also had canned response buttons in the Android app for a while now.

------
subnixr
> Frankly, I'd like Google Assistant to make some of the more soul-sucking
> calls I have to endure. Perhaps it can call and argue with the insurance
> company about doctor bills.

People often forget that companies make various types of agreement between
each other. Let's keep it simple: I have a complaint with my insurance company
and they have some kind of partnership with Google.

What will Google-bot do? I hardly believe it will pursue my interests

------
aquamo
After reading some of the responses to the google demo, my first reaction was
to assume this natural language processing magic was just a placeholder until
the business had a proper api in place. After all, that would be more
efficient, right?

Google doesn't take human phone calls so why should anyone else have to? And
as good workers, efficiency and productivity should trump any expression of
humanity we might have left in this end game of automation :-)

~~~
Sylos
> Google doesn't take human phone calls so why should anyone else have to?

Google lost a lawsuit two weeks ago in Germany, which was about whether or not
a human being would have to be reachable through a contact e-mail address that
they're legally required to put onto their webpage.

Previously, they just responded with canned text containing some links to FAQ
and whatnot.

All they would have to do, is tell one of their employees to read and respond
to those mails for like half an hour a day, so that it's technically possible
to reach a human being through there. Instead they fought out a lawsuit, lost,
appealed, lost a second time and are now considering appealing yet another
time.

German source: [https://www.golem.de/news/kommunikationspflicht-gericht-
krit...](https://www.golem.de/news/kommunikationspflicht-gericht-kritisiert-
ersatzgesetzgeber-google-1804-134052.html)

------
ikornaselur
To me, the biggest issue with writing an email with this auto suggest is that
I think it'll take me longer to write the email that way rather than just
writing it.

Maybe I'm wrong, since I haven't tried it, but I feel like I'd have to pause
every time I'd see a suggestion to think if it is actually what I'm trying to
say, rather than just writing what I'm trying to say anyway.

------
wintorez
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is
violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

~~~
djrogers
And exactly what 'truth' are you referring to here? The 'truth' that it should
be acceptable for machines to impersonate humans?

------
deephoney
I'm reminded of a Ben Marcus story that appeared in Harper's a decade ago.
People would sneak out of their rooms to place carved wooden likenesses of
their faces at the dinner table. The wooden simulacra communed while people
took their meals alone in their rooms.

------
sharcerer
I think this product might be a paid feature. Good way to monetize and recover
the huge amt of R&D $. But a google person on twitter did say they are looking
into ways about letting people know that it's an automated call.

------
anonnel
\- What [political figure] is doing is making ...

\- I think [political issue] should be ...

\- Children must learn that it is always ok to ...

\- Society should be ...

\- The best thing to do with protestors is to ...

\- [ethnicity] are always ...

Serious question. What is supposed to happen for these cases?

------
Waterluvian
I can see a new law: voice AIs must, by law, acknowledge in the affirmative if
asked if they are a robot.

------
ISL
A corollary of this technological evolution is to make personal contacts and
gestures even more impactful.

------
jacksmith21006
Wow the Google demo sure created a lot of attention. Several articles on HN
today.

------
xsrrg
You don't have to use it.

------
organicmultiloc
Google's contempt for all humans that aren't executives at Google has always
been baffling to me.

If I call a company and can't reach a human within about 90 seconds I don't do
business with that company. End of discussion dot period.

I'm sure Google has decided that only 5% of people are like that and therefore
I don't exist but they are completely wrong. Sooner or later the ad gravy
train will run out and they will have to reevaluate this statistical arrogance
style of business management.

