Nick Abouzeid

Google Duplex - An AI assisstant that can talk on the phone 🤖

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Google Duplex is an AI assistant that can actually talk to humans to get what you need. Powered by Google's powerful AI and tucked into Google Assistant, you'll be able to book reservations and schedule haircuts at hundreds of thousands of restaurants in seconds. More features to come soon.

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Calum Webb
"Ok Google, Pick up call from Telemarketers/Fake Windows Support and waste as much of their time as possible"
James Welch
@calum_webb my favorite EVER product hunt comment!!!!! :-)
Menachem Pritzker
@calum_webb funny... my first thought is that this is going to be great for telemarketing :)
Ryan Hoover
@mdavep and prank calls 😈
Davis Baer
@rrhoover We finally have a suitable replacement for soundboard prank calls! https://www.realmofdarkness.net/...
Johann Potakowskyj
@calum_webb @mdavep and for Nigeria Connection calls ... we should tell Google to add special nice features answering love scam calls.
Nick Abouzeid
My jaw hasn't dropped so quickly while watching a developer conference in years. Google is lightyears ahead of anybody in AI, and their new scarily accurate AI assistant is only the first iteration of this tech. Imagine being able to ask every restaurant in New York City what their current wait time is, or when their nearest reservation is... in the course of 30 seconds. Insane.
Hans Yadav
@nickabouzeid Imagine being the business that fields the thousands of calls per day because there’s no cost from the consumer to make them. As the consumer I’m stoked about this tech, but I suspect there will be additional innovation on the business end to curb call fatigue, spam, etc.
Ryan Hoover
@nickabouzeid I spoke with a startup that was building for calling businesses using AI. Their demo was impressive but not even close to what Google just showed off. EDIT: here's that startup
Yann
@nickabouzeid @laxbrownie Pretty sure that the next logical step for Google Duplex is to give Businesses access to the AI to take these kind of phone calls. So at the end of the day we have AI talking to AI ... 🤷‍♀️
Nick Abouzeid
@laxbrownie @yannschaub or API talking to API 🤔
Nick Abouzeid
@laxbrownie This same argument was used when free online reservation platforms (Opentable, Google Reservations) launched... which has been disproven by their stunning success. Consumers aren't malicious.
Jerre Baumeister
Looks like an AI salesforce is eerily close 😐
James Welch
@jerrebm definitely...interesting, scary, exciting all at once
Ryan Hoover
@jerrebm you're absolutely right. I used to work at a call center doing support and outbound sales. Tech like this will eventually replace many of these jobs. We already have (non-intelligent) robot telemarketers.
Swann Polydor
Look like we officially passed the Turing test.
Florent Bouchy

I wish people (especially brilliant people) would stop working on such vain and dooming projets "just because they can" whilst their abilities are so desperately needed to solve major problems like climate change and pollution, politics and wealth distribution, animal and human welfare, health, etc. etc. etc.

Pros:

It seems to "work", but...

Cons:

WHYYYYYYY?!??! So much effort directed towards such shallowly egotistic goals when there are so many real problems to solve on the planet...

Oleg Estrin
Come on, this is just a proof of concept for what Google is capable of in terms of understanding and imitating human speech, they used this as an example because making appointments is easy to relate to for almost anyone. You have to look past the surface and realise what this means for the way we interact with machines in the near future. Imagine a fully conversational interface for your everyday tasks like reading and replying to emails you'll just listen and dictate stuff to your virtual personal assistant and it will never feel like you are talking to a computer. This is basically v 0.1 of the OS they portray in the film HER, I highly recommend it.
Julian Ustiyanovych
C'mon, Florent, because no one pay for it, so obvious :)
Graeme
🤖💬🤖 when the robot answers on the other side
Suganthan Mohanadasan
The AI's voice sounds so natural. Very impressive. What if we take out the caller and put this into the receiver. AI that can answer a barrage of angry technical support calls while keeping the composure and direct people to different department seamlessly. Or even an autoresponder to businesses when people call asking for an inquiry the AI can answer them and also take down details.
Ryan Marr
At first glance this seems incredibly impressive. But at second glance I'm reminded of three hours ago when I got out of the shower and said "Hey Google" to my google designed and built pixel, and nothing happened. I said it again, this time louder and slower "HEEYYY GGOOOGGGLLEE" still nothing. My hands are wet as I'm towelling off and all I want to know is what time it is. Either my phone knows this is what I want and is trolling me, or this demo is years, and years, and years away from being a reality in production. I frankly, won't be surprised if Amazon beats them to market with this same product. My echo dot has literally never let me down. I've almost given up completely on the google assistant on my phone. To give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe the engine behind this is completely silo'd from the existing google assistant?
Daylen Sawchuk
@ryanmarr I am hoping that Google joins the partnership between Alexa and Cortana, so you can ask questions to either AI.
Paul Clark
@ryanmarr Agreed. Amazon Alexa nearly always delivers the result I expect. Google Assistant and Apple Siri fail often. But, I like what I see here-- great competition for Apple and Amazon to all keep pushing the limits.
Tim C
this + Nest could be pretty awesome. Enabling Nest to identify a break in and calls 911 on your behalf.
ಠ_ಠ

This is a new low. First automated call centers that go nowhere. Then chat bots. Technologist like this guy don't get it.

Pros:

It's funny?

Cons:

Robots are stupid and I don't want to live in a world where I don't know if I'm speaking to a person or not.

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