
Ask HN: Is Google recording our calls for Google duplex? - chintanb
Is google recording our every call to train their AI models for google duplex ? e.g. &quot;Mm-hmm&quot;
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ocdtrekkie
My impression is Google's lawyers are not dumb enough to let Google publicly
announce they're illegally recording calls in a two-party consent state:
Presumably their demos were recorded with permission or staged.

But I was definitely curious how they could operate Duplex without running
afoul of existing laws. It's possible Google believes they are not "recording"
the call when they send audio to and from their AI.

They may be _transcribing_ calls to text, which arguably isn't "call
recording", it is just writing down verbatim what was said in the call. They
likely have enough voice data from other sources, like Google Assistant on
people's phones and Google Home that they can avoid recording calls
explicitly.

~~~
patmcc
>>Google publicly announce they're illegally recording calls in a two-party
consent state

Why wouldn't they just run these tests in a one-party consent jurisdiction?
From a quick google only 12 states are two-party. Nothing about the demo
indicated to me it was done in California.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Also a possibility. Google can provide one-party consent since Google is
initiating the call.

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kyrra
GOOG-411 likely gave Google a large datasource for voice training.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411)

~~~
hprotagonist
I believe this has been explicitly confirmed, but I can't find a source at the
moment.

~~~
nappy-doo
As a Xoogler, that is my understanding. Similarly, all the Google Assistants
and (now) Google Homes out there are also being used.

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realusername
They have all the youtube data plus millions of calls they could buy from
call-centers to train if that's not enough, I doubt they need to resort to
record calls.

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kwerk
If you use GCP Enhanced Speech to Text models you’re contributing to a central
model:

[https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/enhanced-
models](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/enhanced-models)

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textmode
"To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex's RNN on a _corpus of
anonymized phone conversation data_." \- Yaniv Leviathan

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forgot-my-pw
They probably already asked the businesses first, then just did the test at
random times.

