
Google I/O'18: Keynote Livestream [video] - kyrra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfYd705cRs
======
TY
The call with Chinese restaurant was simply jaw dropping. Sundar says that it
was real and I have no grounds not to believe him.

This is as close of a demo of technology passing the Turing test as I have
ever seen. Sure, it's not a fully free form conversation on any subject, but
incredibly impressive nevertheless.

Oh yes, and the voice synthesis is just simply amazing. I don't think I'd be
able to tell that I was talking to a bot either.

So far, it's been the most impressive Google I/O keynote that I've ever seen
and it's not over yet.

~~~
VikingCoder
I missed that. Can someone link to that moment?

~~~
dperfect
[https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=1h57m57s](https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=1h57m57s)

~~~
nfoz
I'm really trying not to be another "dystopian" commentor, but I can't help
but feel sad for the restaurant. The call was awkward. Restaurants are busy.
The AI would pause too long and leave her guessing, and respond with the wrong
type of emotion (e.g. a dejected sounding "oh, gotcha... thanks..." after she
had answered his question with the positive "you can come for four people,
ok?". I can't help but think this sort of "corporate lying" (yes it is a lie
to robo-call and pretend to be a live human voice) has an external cost of
frustration and emotional drainage to be borne by society's ordinary people.

~~~
slow_donkey
Maybe I'm a robot but i feel like I would have answered similarly to Duplex. I
expected to be able to make a reservation but got told I have to walk-in
instead.

I'm actually quite surprised it asked for the wait time afterwards, I'm not
sure I'd remember do such a thing.

------
ocdtrekkie
There is some dystopian crud in here in just the few minutes I've watched.

\- Google will write your emails for you so you don't have to. Is this Gmail
user writing me an email or is Google? I no longer know.

\- Google Assistant can now impose Google's parenting values on your kids by
making them say please. Combine with the mandatory Chromebooks in my school
district for full-on indoctrination from childhood.

I am so uncomfortable with this. All the people cheering for it is even worse.

EDIT: HOLY CRUD, they're unleashing their AI to call and harass people on the
phone.

~~~
anderber
I'm not sure I agree 100% with what you said, but I get the sentiment. If
someone is worried about a dystopian crud, why would they purchase a Google
Home or use the Google Assistant? Also, the parenting values I thought was
nice, and optional to turn it on.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I can't escape it when Google's implementing their AI to call and message
other people. They just demonstrated Google's AI calling and trying to
converse with unsuspecting users who aren't even notified they're talking to
Google.

~~~
anderber
What's the issue/reason you see with Google Assistant calling to make a
reservation for a business? Why do you need to avoid it?

~~~
macrael
It's creepy because it's pretending to be people. Phone trees suck, and now a
phone tree is calling you and we don't expect phone trees to call us. Now you
have to wonder when you get a call wether you are talking to a person or a
robot. At the minimum they should announce themselves.

~~~
baumandm
If you can't tell, does it matter?

The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots.
Rather, because they often make it difficult to get the help you need or reach
the right department. If a live human read the script of a phone tree to you
it would be equally (more?) infuriating.

If I called a companies number and got a conversational bot masquerading as a
person instead of a phone tree, that would be a dramatic improvement.

~~~
tlb
Yes. Because if I'm having a bad day and I'm rude to the caller (not knowing
it's a machine), I will feel guilt afterwards. The guilt will be unnecessary,
because no human was offended.

That may be a trivial case, but more generally our social contract is that we
owe a duty of politeness and consideration to fellow humans. When you're
interacting with another human, a big part of your brain is actively engaged
in following social norms. By masquerading as human, machines co-opt this part
of your brain and extract a duty that they don't deserve.

I think every machine caller should be required to identify itself as such.
Restaurants will still be happy to take reservations from them. If one calls
me to sell me something, I can tell it where to go without any guilt.

------
djrogers
Serious question here - legally, what's the difference between a google-bot
calling my place of business and a robocall, which is illegal in the US and
California?

~~~
lsb
The google-bot calling your place of business is tantamount to someone's
butler calling your place of business. Often time, people prefer talking to
professional appointment-bookers.

Sometimes, not. When HR departments are recruiting, they avoid talking to
agencies, with language like "principals only".

~~~
nfoz
Ah, so I suppose there are two dimensions: 1) The caller has a business-reason
for initiating the call; if the receiver doesn't want that sort of call, it's
a problem (spam calls). 2) The caller is a robot, and the receiver might not
want to accept calls from robots, and now they might not even know it's a
robot with which to have an informed opinion.

I wonder which one the robo-call laws are trying to cover, if not both.
Google's certainly doing both, what's new is that the receiver is being misled
about (2) and possibly even (1).

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vthallam
Google is winning with TPU's. Most other competitors even with great machine
learning talent would not be able to match the speed that Google does things
with because of the TPU's.

~~~
raverbashing
And optimized sw for those TPUs

------
nikivi
The Wavenet assisted new voice got me thinking.

I need an Alan Watts voiced Google assistant / Siri.

------
pjmlp
I can hardly believe that people cannot control themselves to the point that
adding features to disable the mobile use is a sell point.

~~~
slow_donkey
If you're referring to 'Shush' I'm excited for that purely for convenience
sake. I see a lot of my friends use that same action (flipping phone over on
table) when we're holding a conversation/eating/etc.

~~~
pjmlp
I just put it on silence and leave it on the pocket.

------
gd2
Theme that I see is branding that besides engineering smarts, Google is
likable, thoughtful, someone you'd want as your friend. Leading with the
hamburger emoji to move the image of Google as more fun / regular human. and
IMHO think its well done.

------
ikeyany
I get the sense that Google isn't completely sincere with its Digital
Wellbeing campaign. Rather than tally up your usage statistics on a dashboard,
why not confront the addictive technologies (social media apps,
clickbait/sensationalist styles of speaking) head on? Surely they have the
data on what addicts people on a deeper level.

One example that comes to mind is "Hey, you've used social media X times
today. Here are some websites you may like that would _increase_ your
attention span."

~~~
mcondit
They actually seemed to have touched on something like that briefly, saying
they'd come back to it in their android segment. Still not sure if it's
sincere but if it is, it's a good set of steps.

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djrogers
> This video is restricted. Try signing in with a Google Apps account.

Ughh.. I really hate this - why does Google put videos like this behind sign-
in walls? Now I gotta go find my g-apps sign-in info, and rmember to purge it
from my browser when I'm done again. GRRRR

~~~
magicalist
It opens in incognito/private browsing for me just fine

------
btutal
I wanted to download it to watch it offline during long bus trip but none of
the downloaders seem to be working for previously live streamed videos on
YouTube. Any other working method?

------
kshatrea
I am not sure what all this is supposed to enable us as customers or users to
do. What I can see is a bunch of ways to avoid human contact including no
longer calling people like a real human or not even choosing my own words in
an email. But from the perspective of someone who dealt with Google's awful
customer service, maybe they could use this in that regard to actually have a
voice on the phone even if it isn't human. Automation is a great thing until
you see the human cost. At some point Google is going to have to use its vast
capacities to not give people more time, instead give them more opportunities.
For e.g. the DeepMind paper showing how to save energy - that was cool.

~~~
tyrankh
> What I can see is a bunch of ways to avoid human contact including no longer
> calling people like a real human or not even choosing my own words in an
> email.

Auto-complete is hardly "avoiding human contact", is it?

Regardless, these features are all optional - if you feel as though you're
avoiding human interaction by using auto-complete, why not just... not use it?

~~~
reaperducer
>Auto-complete is hardly "avoiding human contact", is it?

It is. It removes the color and nuance from typed communication. There's a lot
of metadata in typos.

~~~
tyrankh
> It is. It removes the color and nuance from typed communication. There's a
> lot of metadata in typos.

Oh puh-lease. Are you seriously trying to argue that TYPOS are the anchor upon
which genuine human interaction hinges on?

I mean, wow. If you're trolling that's amazing.

~~~
jakebasile
You conveyed more emotional information in the misspelled "puh-lease" than you
would've with the correctly spelled "please".

------
arijun
the actual keynote starts at 1:20:17. Can someone get the direct link for
people coming later? I can't seem to do it on mobile. And can we perhaps
change the link in the post?

------
Jaepa
This has to my favorite part:
[https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=2536](https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=2536)

------
markdog12
Stream was using AV1 codec for me, on both Chrome and FF nightly.
Unfortunately quality was terrible, for whatever reason

------
chmln
> The all-new Google News provides you a variety of diverse perspectives on
> any given topic to help you get the in-depth, balanced picture

Proceeds to show stories by: CNN, ABC, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vox, and
Politico. Yeah, really diverse perspectives. Its not as if they all hold
nearly the same point of view on any issue.

~~~
guiomie
What would you have in there?

~~~
ihsw2
BuzzFeed and HuffPost are on par with The Daily Wire and Breitbart News --
blatant propaganda ad nauseum.

------
mtgx
Looks like the Google I/O keynote has turned into the Google AI keynote.

~~~
ddalex
All your I/O now belong to our AI

------
sidcool
No new hardware this year? The rest was quite impressive.

~~~
mrep
I cannot seem to find the time but they did announce a new TPU and it is now
even liquid cooled.

Edit: here is an article on it and they are apparently 8x more powerful than
the previous generation: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/08/google-launches-
tpu-3-point-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/08/google-launches-
tpu-3-point-0-third-version-of-ai-chips.html)

~~~
sidcool
I meant consumer electronics hardware, new pixels or chromebooks etc. But
that's for a separate event, apparently.

------
sunseb
I love technology. But I don't like what I see anymore. It's scary now. We are
heading towards a dystopian future. My smartphone is now a black box in
control of my life. I think I will just install a minimal Linux distribution
and forget about these big corporations like Google, Apple and so.

~~~
tyrankh
> I love technology. But I don't like what I see anymore. It's scary now.

Welcome to almost every century in human history heh.

------
rubicon33
I closed it after 20 minutes or so.

I gotta hope that if I were at the helm of a multi billion dollar company that
had been operating efficiently for years, I would take MUCH bigger risks than
Google.

The projects in this keynote were incredibly boring, and some of them
borderline useless. Leave that stuff for smaller companies to tackle, Google.
Take on big problems.

~~~
xedeon
Personally, it seems that during the past few years, Google has become so
bloated and inefficient that innovation has slowed to a crawl.

It's to the point that they are now essentially just like Microsoft during the
Steve Ballmer days. They need a visionary leader that can lead and inspire the
hundreds of smart people they have.

Not to mention the fact how everyone always jokes about how long a product
will last after being announced before they kill it off. Their strategy seems
to be scattershot, rather than having a sense of direction. I'm curious to see
how their internal roadmap looks like.

~~~
jacksmith21006
Inefficient and bloated? They are putting out a ton of stuff. Have YouTube TV
and an excellent product but just one thing.

They appear to be doing an entirely new OS and UI. Flutter is pretty
impressive tech.

Beyond Corp is pretty revolutionary and can see it being the norm.

But so many more. The TPU 3.0. Google Home Max is a great product as well as
Google WiFi.

K8s is on fire and growing like crazy. They have cars driving around without a
safety driver.

So many other things. What in the world are you talking about?

Did you mean some other company?

~~~
jacksmith21006
I am curious who has done more than Google in the last year?

Thanks in advance!

