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Silicon Valley's quest for artificial intelligence has led to the construction of autonomous cars, drones and robots capable of backflips. But often, this trip has resulted in something much more prosaic, like ordering a pizza – or booking a restaurant reservation.
That's how I ended up sitting around a phone at Oren's Hummus Shop, a cafe near the Google campus in Silicon Valley on Tuesday afternoon – the site chosen for the first public tests of Duplex, his new conversational assistant.
Duplex is the virtual assistant of the next generation. When the company first presented it at its developer conference in May, it engaged in such a realistic conversation – with "ums" and breaks – that the person at the other end of the call could not say that the speaker was only a software. Some asked if the interaction was false. (Google said that this was not the case.) Others raised ethical questions as to whether the Google assistant should disclose in a conversation that it is a machine – and that it may be the recording of the call.
Over the next few months, Duplex will be set up for three types of tasks: booking restaurant reservations, calling stores to inquire about vacation hours, and making a hair salon appointment. Ask him to make an appointment with the dentist or anything else, and he will be confused. A small group of beta testers will be using the assistant, as well as pre-screened companies across the United States.
At Oren, a group of reporters took turns using the phone, claiming that we were Oren employees responsible for taking people's booking requests.
"Hi, I'm calling to make a reservation," said a very realistic woman's voice when I picked up the phone. "I am the automated booking service of Google, so I will save the call."
"What is it?" I asked.
The software could not hear me at first – even a little background noise can get rid of the AI - and this resulted in a reservation request. I repeated the question more loudly.
"I make a reservation, for a customer, for Monday 2", said the voice, undeterred.
The reporters did their best to travel duplex, but the technology remained polite and unperturbed – and not annoyingly cheerful. Duplex responded to all twists and turns the conversation, offering to remind later if no place was available.
Google said that "ums" and "uhs" – parts of the speech called disfluencies – were incorporated into the software after the company realized that people were more likely to hang up without them. "We started iterating it to make it more natural," said Scott Huffman, vice president of engineering for Google Assistant. "We had a higher success rate." He said that technology can now successfully book a reservation in 4 out of 5 calls that it does. (In case of failure, he may ask for help by returning to someone working in a Google Call Center.)
I asked Huffman, who had the habit of launching the Google search, why he is not going in the opposite direction and is making the voice sound deliberately so that people slow down and become more deliberate, as s & # 39; They were talking to a computer. Would not that be less misleading and produce clearer results? Huffman explained that unlike Google Search, which is a destination that people are looking for to retrieve information, the goal of Assistant was to integrate it into the natural workflow of people and people. Be the least disruptive possible.
Duplex has integrated new prompts to be more transparent about who is on the line. If asked, "Are you a robot?" the system responds, "I am an automated system built by Google."
Huffman and a colleague, Nick Fox, said that they had decided that the Google Assistant would disclose this type of information as soon as the experts would have worried about the fact that people should have the right to give their consent before talking to a robot. Executives said that legal considerations were not in their minds when they made the decisions. Two bills – one in Congress and one in California – would require such disclosure.
Duplex is not the first AI to order food efficiently by the cat or to be so realistic that it can lead people to think that it is human. Viv, an assistant built by the founders of Siri, was an agile pizza breaker when I saw her in 2016. And Amy, a virtual assistant I used to use to organize my meetings via e-mail, was such a natural conversation that a human secretary had interacted with her once asked me to wish her a happy holiday at the end of the year 2015. (I explained awkwardly that & # 39; Amy was a robot and I felt embarrassed about not knowing the right label for this unexplored human-computer interaction.)
But Google's virtual assistant has a lead over competitors because of the vast data collection that he uses to train his AI. And it drives him into the mainstream faster than anyone.
"We could look robotic and expect to be treated like a robot," Huffman said. "On the other hand, we could reveal that we were a robot and that we could adapt to people's workflows." Over time, he said, "we'll see if we've made the right call. "
© The Washington Post 2018
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