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Comment by Itsdijital | Hacker News Reader

Guys, c'mon, Google didn't make Duplex so that it could revolutionize restaurant reservations. Everyone here is getting so hung up on how there are better/other/existing ways to book a table. Of course there are, but that's clearly not the point of Duplex.

Reservations are just a convenient test bed for the underlying technology. And the underlying tech is 100% the reason for Duplex. Not table booking. It's all about training for AI - speech generation, conversation, language parsing. Making a reservation is a quarter step up and long staircase google sees for this tech.

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i don't know what end goal you think they're training for, but duplex feels enough like an end goal to me. I know everybody likes to say everything google does is all about training the AI, but they have to be training for something.

This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work. making a reservation is the beginning of a sale. being able to book a reservation at any arbitrary restaurant with no extra work on the restaurantuer's part makes google ads more valuable. They can make money off this quite directly.

Google 411 could have been considered an end goal too. It too was concrete and monetizeable. Instead it was actually a way to get a whole lot of natural language voice samples. When it stopped being useful in that regard, they didn't turn around and try to monetize it, they just killed it.

> This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work... They can make money off this quite directly.

The interviews I've read point to an 80% success rate - hugely impressive, but 20% of interactions requiring human intervention is still a _very_ large, expensive staff hungry contact center to run when you are Google scale, for a product that ultimately doesn't really bring in any direct revenue. Each time Duplex fails in its current form, a human operator has to step in to finish the call.

Even Google are telling us not to expect this to ship in anything anytime soon.

From Ron at Ars' demo:

“We’re actually quite a long way from launch, that’s the key thing to understand,” Fox explained at the meeting. “This is super-early technology, somewhere between technology demo and product.”

My point wasn't to say it's a product now, but rather that it is will be a product if everything pans out. The supposition was that this is just another way for Google to collect data, I believe that it's more of a way to use data than a way to collect data.

I guess the goal is to have something like the AI in the movie Her.

Well, they could do what amazon does with aws lex, and offer it as a SaaS product for others to build "something" out of it, adding it to their gcloud stuff.

Exactly, can you hold a conversation with a machine on a given subject given an ontology and a knowledge graph. It is the sort of holy grail of dialog systems. Dr. Boyd-Graber and CU Boulder had a lab working on these problems while I was with IBM doing something similar in Watson.

The ontology provides a structural linkage for both constraining the conversation and surfacing situations where the conversation has broken down. The knowledge graph provides bounds around the conversation space concepts to insure you don't go off the rails semantically.

"restaurant" and "service business" reservations have nicely constrained ontologies so that you can search them in real time and stay synced.

Every problem has a existing solution, but that doesn't mean everyone is using it. Another great use for Duplex is getting opening times for a business. Sure, in theory those times can probably be found on their website, social media, or some other place, but 1. there generally isn't a good standard all across the world and 2. there are dozens of problems like these and not all have existing solutions.

This is where Duplex comes in. It fills in the gap for the lack of standards. The assistant will still try to use booking systems if it can obviously, but when it can't, it's can then resort to Duplex.

This. It's huge.

Enriching the Googlesphere with proprietary metadata at scale that other providers don't have is a clear value add.

And furthermore, customers are doing part of the work required for this.

In that way, it's no different than typical Google product progression.

E.g.: ship Maps with Android, get everyone using Maps, leverage usage share to provide features competitors can't (like real time traffic). Or Chrome.

Get accessibility information while you're in there - that's much, much harder to parse than opening times.

I’m rather confused why doing this as a consumer product in Assistant makes more sense than an enterprise product. There is so much room for improvement in call centers, and would be a huge market opportunity.

This is hardly even a time saver. What would be helpful is if this is also able to stay on hold for you — probably an easy task.

Enterprises are more demanding and have a lower tolerance for error. I have no doubt Duplex will be rolled out to enterprise once the technology is ready and has been thoroughly tested on consumers.

As an enterprise product, Google would require all audio be sent to their servers, which I'm guessing most businesses would not be too keen on doing.

Do you mean a call center bot on the answer side? I would think that's massively harder to do in a way that's noticeably better then the phone tree systems that already exist. Everything simple is already covered by simpler automated systems, and everything that isn't simple is impossibly hard for this level of tech.

Now if Google could make a bot that can call the service line for a company, jump through whatever hoops are needed to get a person on the phone, then ring the call through to me when they got one, that I would pay money for.

Probably because it's far less risky to mess up a dinner order than trash the good name of a company.

But once it's working, they'll be coming for the call center jobs...

In Ars Technica's article Nick Fox, VP of product design for Google Assistant, said:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-cal...

> Fox didn't rule out selling this kind of tech to call centers, but that's another potential down-the-road addition. "There are companies that do that well," he said. "There are very big and established companies that provide software for call centers. It's not the core of our business. We'll see as we go whether we think if we can help there. But it's not a business that we're in today, and it's a pretty well-served business."

I think what Google is doing here is using AI to make its products smarter and then feed that data back into AI to make AI smarter. That's Google's end goal. To use AI to make its product better and frictionless.

Minus "AI" and it's like the same goal for every product/service. I get AI but the term is so over-used now it's just implied as "smarter" which is subjectively true. I don't always need smarter products, rather more relevant and useful. The simple fact that a poor UX in front of "smarter" services can destroy the whole concept.

I do think there is a bigger picture than reservations so for example if I knew that an action just took place the opportunities for highly targeted advertising knowing the context of what just happened could be significant. Feed Google's cash cow.

Google has dropped hints on how it may use Duplex in the way you say - reservations are just a way to train it. An example is to get better data on businesses in Google Maps by calling up businesses to see if they are open or closed on certain days, thus helping to improve one of their key platforms.

I have to disagree here, there is a huge strategic advantage to getting into the booking business in this particular manner. It pressures businesses to set up an account with google to manage reservations as it would be easy to up-sell businesses that are both not online today, or use other services instead. Once companies manage this part of their business via google, it becomes even easier to upsell them on further services including local advertising which is still a massively untapped market when it comes to digital marketing.

I wouldn't say you're disagreeing because my point wasn't that duplex is useless/won't be used for this stuff. It was that booking tables is small outgrowth of a much larger project.

Duplex is as much about reservations as Deep Mind is about playing go.

That's just another enormous data collection tool about users and businesses' activity for Google. That's the main goal. Training -- that's part to make data collection better.

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