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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I love how no matter how amazing something is, someone will eventually say it's trivial, even though it's taken the smartest people on earth decades to figure out how to do this.

>The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.

The end game is clearly to use an api, not this.

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If you ever needed proof of the negativity in the tech community, this thread is it.

Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".

One time, a giant tech company staffed by geniuses released a super-useful tool that saw massive adoption. 10 years later that tool became technical debt.

Wait, it was way less than 10 years.

I'm talking about Google Realtime. Or reader? Or buzz?

No, wait, I'm talking about aggressive Twitter API deprecation/removal.

Wait, nevermind, I'm talking about Facebook.

You get the idea. What's revolutionary today sometimes becomes the substrate for future innovation. Sometimes it gets cast by the wayside, even in the face of significant "user" (developer) popularity.

That's not proof of negativity; just realism. Negativity would be "no new innovation will ever get traction". Optimism would be "all new technologies will change the world" (c.f. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended). This is neither.

Because idea of running machine2machine communication through Duplex, going binary -> text -> voice -> text -> binary, is just fucking dumb.

It's not proof of negativity in the tech community. If anything, it's a proof that tech community often can't pause and look if a particular idea makes engineering sense.

That's how we ended up with Electron.

> The end game is clearly to use an api, not this.

My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all.

Voice bots like this will have the advantage of ubiquity. At least a couple years ago before every resteraunt had 5 tablets for all their seamless/grubhub/chowhound/whatever apps, pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering. Although there were clearly better ways of doing it (see how Dominos reinvented itself as a tech company), the sheer ubiquity of fax as the lowest common denominator kept the tech around.

In that light, it's kinda like the cell-phones-leapfrogging-landlines-in-developing-countries argument... part of the wechat story involves a massive population entering the consumer class at a time when everything was digital. Call me out if this is a gross over-generalization, but in a way, the wechat population never had to deal with the backwards-compatibility of people growing up ordering a pizza over the phone.

It'll be interesting to see how the API-centric approach (wechat) plays out versus the lowest-common-denominator ubiquity approach (voicebots). I'd stop short of calling API's the end game though.

pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering

The fax machine is still around now, and heavily used in the medical context: https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...

My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all.

Meanwhile in NYC, good luck getting the bodega on the corner to even take your debit card.

Eh? The vast majority of bodegas in NYC take credit cards. Many have minimums, or charge a fee if you don't hit the minimum. But I've not been to a bodega in the last ~5 years that didn't accept credit cards in one form or another. > 5 years ago, sure, but now pretty much everyone's got them (even in the rougher neighborhoods).

If they don't accept cards, they almost always have an ATM.

My complaint in NYC is the uptick of "cashless" places, that don't accept legal US tender. I like using cash, I don't want it to go away.

Agree api is the end goal and the wechat model is amazing.

Also, in the WeChat model, everyone is tied to WeChat and can't go around it.

This voice based model can be integrated into any existing system. It already has the network effect going for it and it's not tied to the fate of any one company

No, you just become tied to Google. You can't reimplement Duplex yourself without reimplementing both their API and their voice recognition verbatim, and the best way to do that is to simply use their product.

Not necessarily. Given the rate of progress in AI and the number of companies working on it, it's only a matter of time until Duplex-like tech is reimplemented by other large corps like Amazon and Microsoft, and eventually it'll could even be implemented by startups if there is a decent business case for it

Please go and convince the mom and pop hardware store or bakery in your town to use an API instead of answering the phone.

They’ll do that before getting a robot to answer the phone for them.

Why do you say that?

Because they do it all the time. Open table already solved this problem for 90 percent of restaurants.

Ya, I agree that an API is the right solution but the benefit of this is that both sides aren't forced to adopt it at the same time, it's more resilient to changes on either side...

The benefit is that a human could jump in and take over either side of the conversation.

Anyone can have a conversation, but not everyone can author an API.

Where did I say it’s trivial? What I’m saying is, people ar anthropomorphizing and extrapolating what this system is doing far above what it is actually doing, and then using it to justify fears that Skynet’s around the corner.

This system can’t pass the Turing test, it would be fooled probably by a simple question about itself or a subject outside the domain, like the kind of food you like.

You’ve got people in this thread hyperventilating about AI duping your voice and the. Becoming a doppelgänger and therefore we need laws immediately to stop this dystopia? Let’s calm your cortisol levels for a second and stop acting like Thanos just got the last gem.

I don't think any technically minded people on HN are extrapolating what this system is capable of doing, but are (rightly IMO) extrapolating what kind of systems will be announced in 2, 5, 10, etc. I think even HN is greatly underestimating what world class researchers paired with an army of world class engineering talent are capable of.

I think it passes a limited Turing test at the domain it’s trained in. I doubt any of the people on the other end of the call would even suspect it’s a computer. That’s an amazing achievement.

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