
Google Duplex will call salons, restaurants, and pretend to be human for you - jonbaer
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/google-duplex-will-call-salons-restaurants-and-pretend-to-be-human-for-you/
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chipperyman573
Duplicate
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022963)

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dewiz
A bot calling for you and a bot answering for salons/restaurant. Both
pretending to be human. It’s like having a client/server application speaking
English with an accent, without versioning, schema nor content type. What
could go wrong.

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lucb1e
Well that sounds exactly like humanity. We all know how that turned out.

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Waterluvian
That's a good point. We don't _suffer_ from all those things mentioned. We
have a living API that's meant to be very flexible and adaptive.

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CobrastanJorji
We suffer from it all the time. There's a beautiful and tragic poem called
"The Charge of the Light Brigade" about the results of a failure to
communicate orders well. There's a statue in Rome depicting Moses with horns.

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motohagiography
From the tone deaf product org that brought you google glass and whatever wave
was, comes a solution that does not so much pretend to be human for you as it
does simply dispense with the need for you pretend you possessed any humanity
whatsoever at all.

Next, google Snap! A robot that snaps its fingers at service people to get
their attention...

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zjaffee
I'd argue that this product isn't as much tone deaf as it is a brilliant way
to force businesses to move to using online reservation systems. Phone calls
always take longer, and rather than just selecting a time you have to present
times where there this takes longer when things are already booked.

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s2g
Or they can just start hanging up when this stupid thing calls them.

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sjs382
You would turn down an appointment/sale because it was scheduled by a machine
with a human voice?

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deadmetheny
Yes. I'm perfectly willing to be discerning on who I do business with.

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sjs382
Same—we just draw our lines in different places.

It's been 15+ years since I've worked in the service industry, but from what I
remember of it, I think I'd prefer to take reservations & catering orders from
a Google Assistant.

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bertil
That product reminded me of Facebook’s M, a Messenger-based assistant that
wasn’t able to scale. I guess Fb didn’t have two years ago the tech that
Google has now.

M’s key uses cases are probably going to prove essential here: aside from the
usual flowers-for-my-wife-on-our-anniversary and other difficult-flights-to-
book, basically busy executive stuffs, the massive potential was to deal with
painful cancellation processes for your ISP, bank, gym, etc. If Google (or a
developper using this API) can handle the intentionally convoluted
interactions that those imply, this could be very powerful and make using
Assistant the best way to handle some painful cases. Imagine applying for a
loan, refinancing, switching to a better phone contract whenever there is a
good offer: this technology could advise people to move between services with
significant usability moats much faster, and greatly improve competition and
our experience.

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fsiefken
That is unethical, the human on the other side should be made aware that he's
talking to a machine instead of a human.

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iamrohitbanga
May be the salon, restaurant also have a bot talking to Google assistant.

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kbenson
Amount of compute power wasted for an AI bot to AI bot voice conversation to
make a reservations somewhere boggles my mind.

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fixermark
... agreed, only it doesn't boggle my mind as much as the fact that human
beings get employed full-time to sit near a phone and do this entirely-
automatable task every day.

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ohiovr
Your own personal robocaller. Your droids we don't server their kind here.

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denverkarma
Google is so creepy.

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eb00
I read that as Saloon at first and now I am so disappointed.

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chaoticmass
I don't need software to pretend to be human for me as I am already human and
do not need to pretend.

Corrected title: Google Duplex will call salons, restaurants for you, and
pretend to be human.

