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Comment by cecja | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong I like the tech but I don't get the sentiment. It is just a gimmick or a bridge technology. In the end our phones should be able to talk to the booking system and make the reservation without human interaction. I think the resources could be better allocated, I guess it's just a show and tell kinda project for google but the novelty wears of really fast after the first wrong reservation.

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Everything in life is a "stopgap". In an ideal world we wouldn't need to make reservations at all, our phones would just sense that we were heading toward a restaurant and would work directly with people there to ensure we have a table and our food is ready and paid for by the time we get there.

But we don't live in an ideal world, and making a "perfect" system that nobody uses is useless.

This is a solution that real people can take advantage of right now for many places that don't have the budget or time to integrate with every service out there. It's an real solution to a real problem, and I don't think calling it "show and tell" is fair just because you can think of a "technically better" solution in 5 minutes that you'll never be able to roll out to 90%+ of stores and services out there.

"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"

No the good would be Google hosting a free booking software as a service system and an app or even Google Assistant to interact with the system.

I'm sure companies would jump at the opportunity. Google gets more information about people's habits and it the success rate would be a lot higher.

"Don't let overly complicated be the enemy of the simple"....

Which they can still do! And are in a way (they also showed integrations with assistant and APIs at the same time as showing Duplex).

But that assumes that businesses have the time to integrate, that they care to integrate, and that they can repeat the process for every proprietary API and service out there.

That requires a fulltime developer or another service that does the integration for them. Which again isn't a problem for a lot of businesses, they might be more than happy to do that, but we won't ever hit 100% coverage with those services, especially not across all the "smart assistants" out there.

This allows users to work with almost 100% of businesses right now, and businesses can further integrate without duplex if needed/wanted and the user will not have to care what system the business uses, or how it integrates.

But that assumes that businesses have the time to integrate, that they care to integrate, and that they can repeat the process for every proprietary API and service out there.

Google is the 800 pound gorilla. Companies would integrate with them if they don't want to be left out.

This allows users to work with almost 100% of businesses right now,

You're assuming that it will be good enough and that the businesses won't hang up on it like people do with every other spam automated system.

They already do this actually, but the coverage is pretty spotty. There are still restaurants that don't have websites and you're asking them to set up a digital booking system through Google. It's just not going to happen. Also, I see this tech as more of a way of training up their AIs on tasks that provide a bit of value while they wait for people to connect to the official booking APIs and such.

And this runs head long into competitive issues. Google says they'll integrate the Google Assistant with OpenTable to let you book tables, but what's the chance OpenTable would nix that integration if Google was trying to make a free competitor? Google doesn't want to be in the restaurant booking system business, and this let's them offer a service in their assistant that no one else can.

Companies already go out of their way to place nice with Google (AMP pages). OpenTable really wouldn't have a choice. By being the default, Google has a competitive advantage.

Google doesn't want to be in the restaurant booking system business

Google wants to be in every business where they can gather data to better target advertising.

Your comment misses the critical point though... this hits all the places that have no electronic booking systems. To those here that concept probably seems absurd because we're technically oriented. My barber, doctor, mechanic and favorite BBQ joint however still take phone calls to make appointments and you can talk to them about electronic scheduling till you're blue in the face, they have no desire to change. The goal of this technology is to bridge the gap... start thinking machine to human interaction where machine to machine isn't available.

Not to mention the language barriers. Think of a person still struggling with a language needing to make an appointment in that language. I can see an interface on this where you would select the location and time and have Assistant call them in the appropriate language to handle the exchange for you. No longer is that local pasta place out of my reach when I'm in Italy but can't speak Italian. This opens up a huge realm of possibilities.

this hits all the places that have no electronic booking systems. To those here that concept probably seems absurd because we're technically oriented. My barber, doctor, mechanic and favorite BBQ joint however still take phone calls to make appointments and you can talk to them about electronic scheduling till you're blue in the face, they have no desire to change.

Sure they will change, my barber uses stripe, my doctor does everything else on computer - he's over 60 and three weeks away from retirement, my mechanic has to be technical to operate on modern cars and uses computers for estimates, sending pictures to insurance agents, etc.

At what point in our industry have we ever said "Let's stop innovating and making things easier, we've come far enough, now the people have to adapt to us." Natural language processing and conversation is the next step right now... to me this is such a logical progression I'll be shocked if it's not being planned by many teams.

Natural language processing has been "the next step" since the 60s. How often have you called in to a customer service center and as soon as you knew you were talking to an automated system just yelled "operator" until you got a human?

The minute a busy waitstaff person knows they are talking to a computer they are just going to hang up.

A voice assistant on one side talking to an API on the other side can be close to perfect -- even Apple can get that right with Siri for the intents that it supports especially since you know you're talking to a computer. But going the other way -- not so much.

It's also worth noting that while they show and advertise Duplex making calls because it's pretty cool, they have said that Google Assistant itself will try to use electronic booking first an then try Duplex otherwise.

I don't fully disagree, but you have to realize that there are a great number of people and places that are not hooked up to the internet, due to geography, politics, history, or other reasons.

Some of the best restaurants, hotels, and other experiences in the world are not reachable via an online reservation system.

The place I stayed last weekend can only be reserved by phone. Not because the owners luddites, but to keep out the bargain hunting riff-raff. There was a piece on CBS News a few weeks ago about a restaurant in Maine that's so popular you can only make a reservation by mail.

Sure hotels.com and opentable.com may nail the 80% of what's popular to the kinds of people who go to those sorts of places. But this world is so much bigger and more interesting than the internet or even Google can imagine.

For me the killed Duplex app will be when it's able to make a reservation for me in a language I don't speak. But even though its lost the "beta" badge, Google Translate still isn't ready for primetime.[0]

[0] I say this based on the feedback from the professional translators I work with daily. I put Google Translate text in my work as placeholders, and they have to then re-translate the projects correctly before they can be published.

Would raising the prices be enough to weed out the barfain hunting riff raff? That phone only model just sounds like an excise or a bias against young people who tend to use computers more

Would raising the prices be enough to weed out the barfain hunting riff raff?

With airline miles, hotels.com free night promotions, etc... probably not. People who want something for nothing will try anything.

Booking appointments is one of those areas that suffers terribly from a lack of network effects. Since it is so easy to create a new booking system, there are millions of different ones - your dentist probably uses a way different system from your doctor, for instance, never mind another dentist.

Because it’s easy to create a booking system, making a translation layer between systems is hard. There is no natural incentive for these booking systems to standardize, because each has its constituent users, and none of them are complaining.

So, for now, and probably for a long time to come, booking will be done by humans.

Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices. Then imagine them giving away cheap tablets to run it on....

>Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices.

Very little.

The overwhelming majority of businesses won't switch their booking system unless they have a truly compelling reason. A large proportion of small businesses still use pen-and-paper to manage their bookings and have no intention of changing.

There is still a non-trivial market for dot-matrix printers and NCR paper. Many national retail chains use terminal emulators for their Point of Sale systems. For perfectly understandable reasons, businesses tend to be very conservative about their technology choices. Their current solution might not be perfect, but they know that it works, for a value of "works" that is compatible with their business remaining profitable. They know from experience that new technologies are often more trouble than they're worth.

People would have said the same about payment systems before Strype came along....

Here is an example of who I think you’d have a hard time convincing: I’ve been going to the same hair stylist for about 22 years. Her clients have followed her as she moved around salons in Cupertino. She’s busy enough that many of her clients (including me) sit down at the beginning of the year and book an entire year’s worth of appointments. She only accepts checks or cash.

She’s popular enough that she has felt no market pressure to start accepting payment cards, and certainly has not had any trouble staying busy.

I think there’s a huge chunk of small/single-person businesses that will continue to do things using paper simply because they don’t want to change and they have enough clients that they don’t need to. Once they retire/expire they may be replaced by people that are more amenable to such things.

Do you think she would be patient enough to work with a less than perfect automated voice controlled system?

I think she’d be open to the idea, it’s not like she’s actively refusing business. Taking some reservations from a computer voice is a lot less change and (more importantly), it’s not change she has to initiate.

They already have. https://support.google.com/reserve/answer/7514650?hl=en

Coverage is spotty. It's crazy how much people here underestimate the lack of willingness of many business to use these systems. I live 45 minutes away from SF and recently got a haircut at a decently popular place and it was cash only. Adoption of new technology by small businesses is really slow.

I agree with the sentiment about slow adoption, but in this case, it might not make sense to switch.

If it's decently popular and is fully booked, going cash only would reduce their costs and either give them healthier profits or let them charge less. Most businesses accept cash and card, so they likely already have the daily task of taking money to the bank or having it picked up by a secure truck.

I'd suspect a cash-only business of tax evasion before technophobia.

They would generate some excitement, get marginal marketshare, quietly stop updating the system, let it languish for a few years, then just ghost the system?

And then imagine them shutting it down, and costing vendors billions to replace it.

now there are 17 competing standards...

... clarification: by humans I mean the receptionists, not the Google Duplex.

No man. Nobody cares about the booking of reservations. This is about AIs having useful conversations with people. Start with a very limited context and goal, and grow out from there.

The world is full of stop-gap technologies, because switching is hard and expensive. I have a PNG of my signature and a PDF-to-fax service, because I sometimes need to interface with legacy systems. I still have a checkbook, which I use once or twice a year. I have a full set of metric and SAE wrenches. Hell, I've still got some RS-232 cables.

Duplex is an adapter, a shim, an abstraction layer. It's not perfect, but it solves a problem.

I don't think this is about automated bookings. This is about Google advancing AI.

With this attitude, messy and outdated protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP would be shelved in favor of clean and efficient theoretical protocols that transcend the foolish bonds of our existing infrastructure. i.e. No Internet

This is huge step. No longer does a computer need an API to communicate with someone.

Google Duplex is not really about restaurant reservations.

AlphaGo is not really about winning at the game of Go.

They're both about something else. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

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