Google recently announced Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.

Source: Google AI

Date: May 16th, 2018

Link: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

Discussion

1) Listen to both of the Google AI calls right at the top of this post.  Discuss how amazing it is that you really can’t tell this is a computer making the call.

2) Google is clear to make sure that people know that this is a “closed domain”.  What does that mean?  How “closed” is the call to the restaurant where the person at the restaurant does not follow what the call is about almost at all.