Comment by cg505 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cg505 | Hacker News Reader

The voice is really good, especially small details like sharp air intake before a response to indicate tone. I guess the conversation topics weren't amazing but that's not really the point.

The problem I have is that if you want to engage with something like this, you need to pretend it's a human. As they say, the uncanny valley was pretty much successfully crossed. And to be honest, I don't want to pretend I'm talking to a human for a whole bunch of reasons.

The technically aspects are really impressive, but I think "pretending to be a human" in this way is a pretty scary goal. The cognitive dissonance was too strong and it was hard for me to continue a conversation very long at all. What does it even mean to have a conversation without theory of mind?

People talk a lot about how transformative AI will be but rarely from the point of view it will have on society when interactions like this are 10x more realistic and ubiquitous.

I imagine an agent with this kind of conversational capability but better. And then I imagine that coupled with a video model that presents a proper talking head that is pretty much indistinguishable from a real one

Then what if these personalities were highly configurable to your tastes, had a very long memory and were so cheap and available you could build an entire customised social circle from them.

This is a bizarre nightmare for us but will become the norm for future generations. As rigid and inflexible as it is, my kids even had a hard time understanding Alexa is not real at first, and they have come accustomed to this style of conversational interface from a young age, I think about that but in 30 years for their kids.

If I listen to robot voices for to long it gets unbearable. The fascinating part imho is that human voices apparently have other communication channels that bypass the conscious mind. Like regional accents contain a kind of collective mood but more granular. It must therefore be possible to encode a beneficial feeling into the robot voices. We could all be Irish :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com