Google actually delivers a real world product incorporating the most advanced AI we've had the chance to experience, and half the HackerNews comments are "Wow, this is so dumb, can't wait for it to become technical debt in 10 years".
Wait, it was way less than 10 years.
I'm talking about Google Realtime. Or reader? Or buzz?
No, wait, I'm talking about aggressive Twitter API deprecation/removal.
Wait, nevermind, I'm talking about Facebook.
You get the idea. What's revolutionary today sometimes becomes the substrate for future innovation. Sometimes it gets cast by the wayside, even in the face of significant "user" (developer) popularity.
That's not proof of negativity; just realism. Negativity would be "no new innovation will ever get traction". Optimism would be "all new technologies will change the world" (c.f. https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended). This is neither.
It's not proof of negativity in the tech community. If anything, it's a proof that tech community often can't pause and look if a particular idea makes engineering sense.
That's how we ended up with Electron.
My understanding is API integration is what wechat is in china -- every hair salon and equivalent-of-corner-pizza shop has some wechat integration, payment and all.
Voice bots like this will have the advantage of ubiquity. At least a couple years ago before every resteraunt had 5 tablets for all their seamless/grubhub/chowhound/whatever apps, pretty much the only reason the fax machine was still around was for restaurant ordering. Although there were clearly better ways of doing it (see how Dominos reinvented itself as a tech company), the sheer ubiquity of fax as the lowest common denominator kept the tech around.
In that light, it's kinda like the cell-phones-leapfrogging-landlines-in-developing-countries argument... part of the wechat story involves a massive population entering the consumer class at a time when everything was digital. Call me out if this is a gross over-generalization, but in a way, the wechat population never had to deal with the backwards-compatibility of people growing up ordering a pizza over the phone.
It'll be interesting to see how the API-centric approach (wechat) plays out versus the lowest-common-denominator ubiquity approach (voicebots). I'd stop short of calling API's the end game though.
This voice based model can be integrated into any existing system. It already has the network effect going for it and it's not tied to the fate of any one company
Meanwhile in NYC, good luck getting the bodega on the corner to even take your debit card.
If they don't accept cards, they almost always have an ATM.
My complaint in NYC is the uptick of "cashless" places, that don't accept legal US tender. I like using cash, I don't want it to go away.
The fax machine is still around now, and heavily used in the medical context: https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
Anyone can have a conversation, but not everyone can author an API.
This system can’t pass the Turing test, it would be fooled probably by a simple question about itself or a subject outside the domain, like the kind of food you like.
You’ve got people in this thread hyperventilating about AI duping your voice and the. Becoming a doppelgänger and therefore we need laws immediately to stop this dystopia? Let’s calm your cortisol levels for a second and stop acting like Thanos just got the last gem.
>The end game would be for the business to run something like duplex on the other side, and you’d have duplex talking to duplex.
The end game is clearly to use an api, not this.