As someone who worked in tech support early in their career, I do not.

The entire process of fielding calls is terrible. You never know what's waiting for you when you pick up the phone. Could be someone with a terrible attitude that wants to take it out on you. I had coworkers who got PTSD, and a ringing phone would trigger it.

I would rather talk to a rational robot on the phone than a possibly irate human who, frankly, only wants something transactional from you and treats you like a robot.

It's not going to replace. It's going to add to.

First because it will fail a lot, as robot won't understand specifics such as what items on the menu do you want, oh but it's missing, do you want this instead.

And then you will multiply commercial calls, and spam mails will arrive on the phone.

Then people will abuse it to harass, annoy, attack competition, etc. Spam a restaurant with robot phone calls for a month and it's done.

Plus google will analyse all this data, because it doesn't know enough about you.

It's a nigthmare.

But it will be excellent for anybody with social skills. What i learn living in africa is that we became handicaped because we can avoid talking to other humans so much. Going back to france, my social, sexual and work life improved a lot because i had basically zero competition. The next generations will really suck at the game.

... well it won't add to the PTSD at least unless they design the robots to lose their temper. Kind of agree about the loss of social skills.

As someone who worked very closely with tech support and sometimes fielded calls, I echo this. It's batshit insane to field support calls, L1 especially. Honestly, no human deserves the wrath of support calls. You get yelled at for no apparent reason and all you can do is be patient. Who knows what the psychological consequences are. I have seen customer support people lose their temper in otherwise normal situations.

I had a company for 15 years and I still hate it when the phone rings. Phone calls were always messing up whatever I had planned for the day and it made it harder to get shit done.

Well, it'll start sucking when they call back to cancel because the robot found a better appointment.

I do feel for them, but at the same time we have these unintentional designs and systems that cause a lot of suffering all over the place.

For example, I was kept on hold for 2 hours the other day to try and sort out being double charged on my bankcard. If this sort of service can handle hold, then i'm in.

I'm sure this system can and will be used to handle you on hold. ;) Be prepared for obfuscating phone trees that can talk back.

Deep learning RNN "Retention Department" bots, trained on every customer complaint ever. (kill me now...)

Precisely, the implications of this are just AIs getting stuck in a recursive loop or getting into a battle of training to best the other.

Exactly. People think it will be used for better service. It won't. It will he used to save money. At the expense of the human. When was the last time you were satisfied with a web site help page ? They usually suck big time. They have zero way to help you on your specific situation.

I would feel infuriated to have to talk to a robot making me waste my time. At least during a waiting song I can put the speakers on and do something else.

fine by me if it uses tail recursion.

would be funny if it didn't and somehow blew the phone system's stack.

Some IVR systems do this now, it gives you an estimated wait time, and calls you back when you get near the front of the queue.

Or cancelling your cable.

Or monitronics account

Maybe it'll motivate more businesses to put more of their transactional things online where the bot can do it without bothering a real human, and real humans who don't want to use this can also avoid spending more time on the phone than they have to.

Honestly, the degree to which telephone calls are still necessary in day to day life is absurd. If this hastens their demise then I'm all for it.

Phone calls are necessary for anything that needs flexibility.

Coding flexibility in a website is incredibly hard.

Think about it. A restaurant doesn't have anything veggie on the menu, a last minute guest arrives and is veggie. You call to ask if there is something that can be done.

It's possible to code that, but it's a lot of work to get all the scenarios right.

I said transactional things, by which I mean things that don't require any special figuring for the vast majority of cases.

In the case of a restaurant, having their menu online would make it so you knew in advance of the restaurant has something you can eat. Lots of restaurants still don't do even this.

A restaurant that doesn't do this is not going to setup a phone answering bot.

I... really think you're missing the thrust of what I'm saying here? Nowhere did I say I thought they would.

Yes! Voice/conversations leads to a fundamentally different UX.

The store is still getting the customer, the retail rep is still getting the same call. What's so horrifying?

I see this as leveling the playing field -- upper middle class people can already afford real assistants a la Tim Ferris; this just lets everyone access it.

Is it not conceivable that the rep would eventually replaced with a like kind system?

In short order I would imagine.

I spent two hours on the phone today with customer support, one of the least enjoyable and least productive ways to spend an afternoon.

I try to automate tasks that don't use my strengths or bring me joy and this would be a huge win in that area.

Don't worry, soon they won't have work. That horror awaits us all.

BTW AI's can also solve status problems: http://partiallyclips.com/comic/dome-house/

Have you ever worked in retail or the service industry? I think I'd rather chat with the AI :)

Now I'm wondering what could be code-words to signal that they're AI and go into modem-mode...

"Hi there, I'd like to schedule an appointment" "Are you suuuure?" SCCREEECH KSHHH...

And the secret knowledge that a specific whistle from a cereal box - blown into the phone at just the right time - can land you a Saturday night reservation at French Laundry.

they could just encode the message in a way that’s inaudible to humans.

So a simple “hello” contains a subliminal audio signature that basically is code for “I am a robot. Are you a robot? Feel free to beep bop”

Machine A extends the "hellooo" out to exactly 1.32 seconds, with a 1.32 second pause between that and the next word.

Machine B responds with a greeting exactly 1.32 seconds long, with a 1.32 second pause after it.

Machine A responds with a sentence in which the first word is exactly 1.32 seconds long.

Machine B considers the handshake a success and proceeds in machine language.

Oh dear, polyglot to audio steganographic phone calls, the audible message doesnt even has to be the same then the one encoded in microgaps and envelope shifts and all kind of modulations.

That's right- I started thinking about it because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16046329

Surely someone out there is doing audio steganography by modulating the volume/duration of "silence".

What makes you think this won't be used by people of all classes?

And did you hear the recordings? The AI is better at conversation than the humans it had to deal with. I would gladly use this to avoid talking to people who can't parse a plain sentence without rounds of repetition and clarification.

AI tools, including Google's Duplex, will benefit the bottom ~90% of the planet radically more than it will benefit the wealthy. That has been true of nearly all technology from the past few hundred years at least.

The wealthy will largely continue employing humans to do tasks for them, because they can. It will be just another form of luxury / status. An AI assistant will be considered beneath their class. The technology will be nearly universal and extremely inexpensive, two things rich people dislike as it pertains to signaling their status.

I don't think so. 48% of people have access to the internet, 41% in developing countries. All these people won't be able to benefit from this at all. That doesn't even count the ones that have dialup or comparable speeds (like on Cuba) where transferring anything beyond a couple hundred kilobyte is unbearable.

The wealthy will employ AI the moment it can do the same tasks as a human, unlike humans the AI is cheap, doesn't take time of work, always available, never tired or grumpy, etc. The maintenance work of having an AI worker vs a human worker is just way lower.

The moment a corporation like McDonalds can replace the entire staff with robots without having a dip in efficiency they will do that. 24/7 operation would be linearly more costly to 9-5 weekday operation.

The wealthy will stop employing humans to do tasks for them the second that AI can do those tasks better, or with less effort.

Then a few seconds after that the Singularity starts.

Don't worry. They'll still get calls from plenty of people who aren't sure what they're looking for, don't have any manners, or are hard to hear on their speaker/car phones.

That would be cool. Time to unearth that old Cap'n Crunch cereal whistle to test whether we are truly talking with another human.

The problem is that I don't want more voice; I want less voice and more automation.

I don't want to have to interact with a human because the only time a company makes me interact with a human is when they think it benefits them (upsell, make leaving difficult, etc.).

What I want are good ways for me to handle this stuff via computer without human interaction.

Well, now Google can provide you with the Human<->Human interaction and then give you the automation and computer interface.

For me, the money quote is:

> Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains.

The question becomes - How many people will really have the time and money to actually collect data to allow Duplex to take over. It might be true for large call centers but difficult at individual level.

Every call center in the world is now looking to sell their recordings.

Curious, where can someone buy these recordings?

Most call center save recordings for "Training and internal purposes".

Well, that will be until the shop owners install AI assistants to reply customers calls, then we’ll have robots talking to robopts using human language, which would make the whole idea nonsense...

If the robots can interact with people who can't use a computer, then user accessibility could improve over the current situation. Like most technology, this has potential to improve the human condition for many or few. It depends on how people use it.

The working class people will be replaced by AI

The productivity gains from AI will make new jobs possible and will free up capital to be deployed in new economic creation. That is a cycle that has been essentially non-stop for the last 200-300 years (particularly aggressive and accelerating in that time frame). As populations decline and population growth stagnates, we won't have anywhere near enough people to fill the job openings in the future. The working class will benefit extraordinarily from the AI boom, it will raise their wages, it will produce an immense bounty of new jobs that will mostly go unfilled and it will drastically improve their standard of living.

>> AI

Arguable to some extent

>> new economic creation

This is a dependent variable

>> As populations decline and population growth stagnates

Another

I get it, this is the way its supposed to work, but we cannot just guarantee it.

Was thinking about that too. Even humans could start developing their personalized own shorthand lingo, think cattle auctions, ATC, or other narrow topic applications, that don't need formalites emphasize on less ambiguity, speed and confirmation. Could easily speed up Computer to human calls a very significant amount.

You need to worry more about the people who work in call centers who're about to lose their jobs soon.

At least this might ease some of the pressure on the housing market in the Bay Area. By transferring minimum wage workers jobs from San Francisco restaurants and shops to datacenters in Northern Virginia and North East Oregon, we can free up valuable real estate for FANG workers struggling to find a room to rent within the budget of somebody earning only $250k per year...

> Upper middle class

Anyone who can afford the cheapest Android phone is not exactly upper middle class