Hacker News Reader

Comment by TY | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

I missed that. Can someone link to that moment?

https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=1h57m57s

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.

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.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...

here are some more examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RHG5DFAjp8

If you'd like to read up on Google's voice synthesis system do read up on wavenet: https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio... from deepmind.

Jeez, this thing is just about ready to Dungeon Master.

Assistant, "Okay, I need you to roll initiative. What did you get?"

Me: "27."

Assistant, "Umm... You're a first level Barbarian. How did you roll 27 on Initiative?"

Me: "I mean 17."

Assistant, "Uh huh."

I wonder how long it will be before there is a call to book a restaurant where both sides are AI assistants

AI assistant calls could start with a modem style handshake to determine whether they can conduct the transaction much more quickly with an Internet API. I'm sure it could be much shorter these days, but hearing the same noisy handshake today would be amusing.

Bringing us alllllll the way back to dial-up

Yeah, that was pretty much jaw dropping. I'm excited to see it in action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com