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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

The technology is impressive. The demonstration choice was disengenous. It seems way more likely to me that the early adopters of this technology will be companies that will be able to replace phone receptionists with automation - already widely done by large companies, but now, thanks to this technology, available to doctors offices, restaurants, hair salons and many medium sized businesses.

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That was my initial reaction as well. I felt as if Google was trying to position this as "We're not really going to kill a ton of jobs, just look how helpful it can be as a person trying to book an appointment", but that was pretty transparent.

Duplex will definitely be used in the opposite direction than demonstrated. Its acceptable to talk to a robot over the phone, and improving that process is very valuable.

But having a robot speak to the business? That might be a bit much. Then again, if this version is only for appointments, reservations, etc, than that might be seen as acceptable in kind of the same way.

It's mostly the hesitation about when this starts going beyond that. Do you now use Google assistant to talk to friends/coworkers? "Ok, Google, ask $friend if he wants to see a movie this weekend."

I hope it never gets to, "Ok Google, run Microsoft Support Scam 3 on Victim List 5".

One of the advantages of Google hosting this (as opposed to, say, this technology being an "out in the wild" agglomeration of voice synthesis and machine learning open-source solutions bailing-wired together) is that there's one central authority that can be held accountable.

You're not going to see the described scenario because there's nothing in it for Google, they have full control over both the Google Assistant ecosystem and the set of technologies powering this machine-learning interaction, and they can gate-keep it as much as they want to.

That having been said... If one company can do it, we're only N years out from the tech becoming available "in the wild" as a bailing-wired selection of open-source tools (probably in a Docker image somewhere ;) ).

Even if not another company, people develop actions for Google Assistant so I don't think it's that wild to think that 3rd party Duplex behaviors could be something Google is considering.

You can already ask Google to send a message to your friends, what would be the point of the call? The goal of Duplex is to interface with businesses that are still stuck in a phonecall-only world.

It won't be annoying, because the other person is going to want to have an AI screen their phone calls and the two systems can just figure out the most likely time the humans want to hang out and then get them to confirm.

Employing an AI to be your personal assistant is at least as moral as employing a human to be your personal assistant. Perhaps more, given the very limited lifespan humans have.

I don't think the behind the scenes were exposed how this all worked and the development time but high tech like this is typically not accessible to small/med businesses because the overall costs to implement. Large corporations with existing crap IVR's is definitely a target.

Give it 3 years where it's a game changer to a bigger audience and devices. I could see this complementing teachers or enabling a whole new method of interactive learning, not making appointments.

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