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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

A few observations:

* In the example where Google asked about holiday hours -- they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info. Interesting thought experiment is Google validating their reviews/business listings by actually calling businesses and speaking to a real human.

* This is going to be fantastic for accessibility. Maybe I struggle to speak, and I want a reservation. I can have the machine do the irritating work, and focus on just having a nice meal or getting a service (like a haircut).

* Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose.

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> Google can scale out your requests, one to N. For example, 'Make me a reservation at a 4 star restaurant next Friday.' Google can immediately initiate calls against 15 restaurants and let you pick from the successes, then automatically cancel the reservations for the places you did not choose.

This sounds like a nightmare for businesses. This time commitment asymmetry will be the issue with these systems. Like email spam, it becomes much easier to waste others people's time when you automate time wasting. If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

>This sounds like a nightmare for businesses.

They pointed out during the presentation that the system could call once to a business and get the hours, then allow hundreds or thousands of users to see that without bothering the business again. Assuming it works, it could save a significant amount of time for some places.

>If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them.

If they allow something like the parent commenter pointed out, they would sour relationships with businesses who would promptly seek out ways to block or decline calls from this system.

This works only if Google allows that same data to be used by other businesses who would benefit from having it listed.

Technically it works as long as most users use Google, but I agree it would work better if they share the data!

If they don't share the data then businesses will start being bombarded with bot calls (whether they know they are bots or not) once businesses start copying it, which should lead to regulation, however with how easily scams happen through the phone lines - I don't know how they'd be able to regulate and enforce this either to protect businesses' time.

>>If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

>Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them.

But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business.

Seems far more likely that they'd pay Google to automatically handle duplex calls for them.

The worse this technology turns out for businesses, the more pressure there is to pay google money.

>But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business.

If it's costing more money than it's bringing in, then it's no longer worth it. If it's bringing in more money than it costs, then it's a good thing for the business.

If a business needs to hire a dedicated phone person because they are getting so many appointments filled, they aren't going to be upset. But if they get so many flakers that won't show up, they are losing money as customers that will show up are getting pushed out, so they will block Duplex. There are also other ways to solve this problem, require a phone number and name and block or charge people for missed appointments if they try to reschedule. Require some kind of down-payment over the phone when making the appointment. There are tons of solutions to this problem.

At no point is "Pay google to handle the calls" an option. This is really only for places that don't have an online appointment system (that possibly integrates into google), so the solution to the duplex calls would be to invest in one. Since "pay google to handle duplex" would look a lot like an API to a scheduling system anyway, and an independent one (with integrations into Google's systems) would reach more customers.

Google may not be making money from direct payments from businesses, but getting access to yet another aspect of the life of their users (in this case, appointments made with what business and when), would be invaluable to them.

Just one more way that big business is taking over our lives. The world is becoming incredibly scary.

The spam factor can go the other way too. Imagine the same type of program automating the spam / scam calls to the elderly.

Yeah, the phone lines getting that polluted is not a pleasant prospect.

This conversation reminds me of "Lenny", a simple bot someone created to talk pointlessly in circles with telemarketers for hours until they hang up in frustration.

https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Yes, I was thinking the same thing. This Duplex system would be like a super-Lenny. Eventually telemarketers will probably figure out, though, that if they reach someone who is calm and friendly and very receptive to their pitch, yet never quite gets to yes, it's probably an AI.

By the same token, telemarketing companies could employ Duplex to call people. I guess if a Duplex telemarketer reached a Duplex telemarketer-baiter, the conversation could stretch on for a really long time and might make for amusing fodder on Youtube.

It's a strange new world!

It has been a nightmare to deal with chatbots and voice-synthesized phone "customer support" gatekeepers. It's time to turn the tables. This doesn't have to only apply to restaurants and such, much better to let this loose on the various unresponsive megacorps. Who knows, they may find it less costly to actually deal with customers than pay for compute against a worthy adversary.

2018: customer support becomes telephone robot arms race. It’s hard to keep believing that capitalism is actually a productive worthwhile pursuit for humanity.

There's a customer on the end of the line with a serious intent to book, restaurants would be dumb not to hire a minimum wage worker to take those calls.

If you could read 15 spam E-Mails to have a >50% chance of a $100 dinner reservation you'd hire someone to read your spam.

> If people use it to flake a lot, I could see businesses just not responding to the assistant.

Or being forced to use for Google's small business version of Duplex to handle the increased call load (for a small fee of course).

Or just set up an online booking system.

Knowing google. There will likely be a free tier and then higher tiers that handle multiple phone lines, complex call routing and eventually customer service case handling.

The easy solution (and Google should push for it) that the call receiver is Google Assistant as well, built-in to a landline phone kept at the business!

In the olden times, I used to look up a business in the phone book and call them to see what their hours were. At some places, every call was picked up by a recorded message that stated what their hours were.

Today, it is much easier to just put in your preferred time and rating into Open Table and see what's available.

> they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info

Besides the business-side run-your-business-like-a-callcenter application, this is the "caller-side" application that's going to make money for Google. The others (virtual personal assistant) have been historically hard to get mass consumers to pay for.

It's straight out of the StreetView playbook... industrialize the scale of data collection, give the results out for free, then monetize the eyeballs (eg more accurate yelp).

Then again, Google ran that free 411 service for a few years that turns out was just a massive natural voice recording data corpus miner...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

" Business model Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching. "

I’m not sure what is a 4 star restaurant given that the Micheline guide gives maximum 3 stars, but pretty much all starred restaurants want a deposit when reserving. If seriously there was someone dumb enough to do something like this, booking and cancelling continuously restaurants, then probably everyone would require a deposit when reserving and the deposit would be much bigger than today.

I've never heard of deposits for reservations for a restaurant. And I've at least once made a reservation for restaurant with a Micheline star.

I'm not sure if this is common practice at least in Europe. I'm sure it's unheard-of in Turkey (and I've been lucky enough to make reservations for some high end and/or very popular restaurants).

May I ask in which countries you've experienced this in? I'm genuinely curious.

I travel all over the Us (Texas, NYC, and Cali mostly) and I've literally never had to put down any kind of deposit or anything of the sort when making dinner reservations, and I frequently make reservations at plenty of nice, upscale places.

It's common in San Francisco. Chubby Noodle is an example I booked today for a party of 8.

Many high-end restaurants in NY, CA, Berlin, Copenhagen, etc. require a deposit. See Tock (all prepaid, https://www.exploretock.com) or Resy (some prepaid, some cancellation fee, https://resy.com).

Auberge in Napa requires a valid CC to make a reservation https://aubergedusoleil.aubergeresorts.com/dining/

Funny enough they also use OpenTable, so no need for this Google stuff — just use the API or book through the site. You can also call them if for some reason that is preferable.

I’ve had reservations at upscale places in LA ask for a credit card up front and threaten a fee if I were to no-show, and some places have minimums for premium tables (e.g. 71Above window tables). A deposit up front doesn’t seem too far out of the question.

Italy, France, uk. Some of them were not even starred.

I live in Portland, OR and I have to pay up front for a number of places I go to. Usually not the full meal (I think one or two places do that) but there's a deposit essentially that is taken off your bill (or given back if you cancel 24-48 hours ahead of time) at a good chunk of the nice places around.

> I’m not sure what is a 4 star restaurant given that the Micheline guide gives maximum 3 stars

It's the user rating from Google Maps users. They are represented as stars and you can filter based on them.

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