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Comment by Omnus | Hacker News Reader

It "feels revolutionary" to the author, but it is literally only capable of handling the simplest restaurant and hair salon reservations (the kind of thing you could do yourself in about 90 seconds). Seems like a silly headline, although the details are interesting.

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> (the kind of thing you could do yourself in about 90 seconds)

I can also walk over to my kitchen, stepping around the dogs and cats, and pour a glass of milk in about 90 seconds too, but a robot that can reliably do that would be pretty damn revolutionary.

Don't underestimate the insane quantity of wetware computation going on during a short conversation.

Apart if you need to set it up for half an hour, and it fails 10% of the time, you just get up and get your glass of milk.

Actually it fails at least 20% of the time. Your floor cleaning robot will fail at cleaning it up 20% of the time. I'm not good at math, but I think that means you'll be spending 95% of your milk drinking time cleaning your floor...

What on Earth are you talking about? The point was not that anything humans can do within 90 seconds is non-revolutionary when implemented in machines. An artist can create something unique and beautiful in 90 seconds, and a mathematician can explain a short yet difficult proof in 90 seconds. Those things would absolutely be revolutionary if implemented in machines. Who cares about the quantity of computation? As if that matters for how "revolutionary" a software technology is.

It is entirely unclear to me that a bot that might make simple reservations at small group of establishments that include only restaurants and hair salons is in any way revolutionary. Even if it worked 100% of the time, who is making daily hair and restaurant reservations that would benefit from the extra 90 seconds? It's silly the amount of hype this is eliciting. You have a very strange definition of "revolutionary".

> […] who is making daily hair and restaurant reservations that would benefit from the extra 90 seconds?

The wealthy have had assistants since practically time immemorial, and no one bats an eye at their "90 seconds". The promise of this tool is a democratization of both the convenience and the normalcy.

> It is entirely unclear to me that a bot that might make simple reservations at small group of establishments that include only restaurants and hair salons is in any way revolutionary.

If it is an extensible technology that requires relatively minor tweaks to expand the domain of applicability, then it is revolutionary thougj the effect won't be fully felt until it has been more broadly applied.

If it is narrowly tailored such that the next two domains will cost nearly as much time and money to build out as restaurants and hair salons, then, sure, it's minimally useful.

Google's been promoting it as the first, and that seems in character with what Google does.

> As if that matters for how "revolutionary" a software technology is.

Doesn't matter if you're only interested in it as a consumer. But then why would you be on HN?

Your entire comment would apply to introduction of the first transistors, which were worse than vacuum tubes in almost everything except size - and nobody at the time particularly cared for their size.

A chatbot that only works within a limited domain is not "revolutionary". It's been done before. The NLP part is relatively easy in a limited domain. Given enough time and enough users, it could be an ELIZA 2.0 level of programming.

The harder part is voice to text (not rocket science and that can be done pretty reliably) and natural sounding text to speech.

Can't wait to see the bot you use to make millions with in competition with Duplex

With Googles reputation of dropping products and letting them wither and die, and Google’s lack of ability to monetize anything outside of search, there is just as much of likelihood that they won’t make money off of it as I won’t....

Its all simple in retrospect. The classic case, obviously, is Dropbox where HN dismissed it as 'its just rsync. What's the big deal'.

At the end of the day, Dropbox is becoming more of a feature than a product as Steve Jobs said.

For the $9.99 a month that Dropbox costs for a terabyte, you can get Office 365 that includes One Drive for 1Tb each for up to 5 users.

It must feel at least a little bit revolutionary since half the internet was saying that the demo was faked.

Probably the best compliment Google could get.

People were fooled by hype, a usual occurrence with new "AI" technology. That says nothing about how "revolutionary" it is.

Technology should aim to solve problems both big and small. If all we did was life-extension and deep space exploration, nobody would be solving problems we have today -- tracking how much food we eat automatically or how much fuel should be injected into the engine based on driving conditions/style.

You might think this isnt new "AI" technology, but as others have showed this is the first time we've seen an "AI" tech convincing masses that it is real human using voice.

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