Am I Talking to the Real You?
There has been a while since the release of Google Duplex at Google I/O 2018. But I still find people misinterpreting the way how Duplex works. But I don’t blame the people because I too was shocked when I saw this thing in action at Google I/O. Hence I decided to make a quick article explaining the real story behind Google Duplex and clearing some of the common misconceptions about it. I have put a short illusive story to explain my point in a more intuitive way.
Last week I was assigned the task of inviting my family members for a function. Considering that I didn’t have a messaging group of my family members, I needed to call them individually. Now that is a pretty tedious, boring, repetitive and a time consuming task. But no big deal, my phone did it for me so that I could watch my favorite FIFA team winning.
Now the question arises is that “How did my phone invite my family members without even messaging them and without me talking to any of them? Did my phone just talked to them and invited them all by itself? How did it fool those guys to believe that it was a human talking to them? ”.
Let’s break the suspense and come to the meat of this article & know how all this happened.
Recently Google’s most anticipated event of the year Google I/O came to an end. This year Google revealed some exiting updates coming to its group of products. It included the Smart Compose feature in Gmail which suggests words to complete your sentence, Google Images will now help you find similar products to your images and finally some augmented reality coming to Google maps this year. Even though these updates may sound amazing, it would be fair to say that they all were dominated by a single and the most talked about product of Google I/O 2018 The Google Duplex.
Duplex is a technology to enable computers to have a natural conversation over phone. It is a conversational AI which sounds like a human and can complete sophisticated tasks without sounding like a computerized voice. The goal was to enable people to have a natural conversation with computers, as they would with each other. In the past years, many autonomous bots were introduced like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana which provided a way for humans to communicate with computers using natural voice. But often it’s quite frustrating to hear these computerized voices that often don’t understand natural language. Duplex is a big leap in this field as it is designed completely to sound like a human and carry out natural conversations with them.
Coming to its working, the duplex systems involves the following steps:
1.User tells Google assistant to Book an Appointment with a Client.
2. Google Assistant then tells Duplex to make a call to the respected Client.
3. Google Duplex calls the Client, talks to him, asks for an appointment and books it.
4. Google Duplex then returns the call information back to Assistant.
5. Finally Google Assistant displays the result to the user.
It’s interesting to note that the Client never came to know that he was talking to a Computer and not to a human. This means that it’s for the first time a machine is able to fool a human by completely mimicking a human voice.
It led to a big debate among people that ,
“Has Google Duplex successfully passed the Turing Test?”
Turing Test — “When a machine start to mimic humans and develop enough intelligence that it is impossible to differentiate between a machine and a human.”
But the reality is that, “No, Google Duplex didn’t pass the Turing Test Completely”.
Because although Duplex was able to make natural conversations with humans, it works best when it’s performing a very specific task (i.e. scheduling an appointment or reservation at a very specified time) and less suited to make a general conversation out of the task assigned to it. Google Duplex was trained using Deep Learning for very specific situations and hence cannot be called a general machine which can carry out any type of conversations.
Even though the shortcomings Google Duplex has a wide range of applications for many businesses.
Some Applications include:
· Duplex can call a Doctor and book an appointment for you.
· In case of noisy/crowded locations, duplex can talk to other person on your behalf.
· Hearing-impaired users, or users who don’t speak the local language can use duplex to make calls on their place.
Google Duplex can be seen as an effort to increase and improve Human-Computer interaction. It’s only the start for systems like Duplex and they are bound to improve in the future. These advancements will enable humans to increase their productivity by better interacting with computers. But with increase in human sounding computers, there are many possibilities of misusing them.
Eventually when a computer masters human voice, the biggest concern will be that people will start using computers to talk on their behalf. This may confuse other people and as a result give rise to a new question in their minds that,
“Whether I am talking to the real you?”.
References : Google AI Blog
