Thread by @caseorganic

Quick thread on the @GoogleAI’s Duplex from a Calm Tech UX perspective. It’s impressive and a great step forward, though perhaps not as groundbreaking as some believe. Here’s why... 1/10

ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex…

From @GoogleAI’s write-up: “Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.” In other words, Duplex is a good example of applied “Narrow AI”. 2/10

Narrow AI doesn’t try to do everything - just things with very few variables: Location, date & time, number in party, reservations. It works because it has examples for when you can’t make a reservation. (I.E., “What’s the wait time like?”) 3/10

But each domain is very different. There are a whole universe of differences between booking a hair appointment at a salon vs. booking a table at a restaurant. This points to the limitations of Google Duplex. 4/10

It’s an impressive step forward, but it’s impressive because it’s restricted to a narrow domain. This is where we’re really at with AI technology. 5/10

We’ve been promised too much from Artificial Intelligence for a very long time. So when companies under-promise by restricting AI to a domain, they’re more likely to be successful 6/10

I should add that Duplex’s voice concatenation aspect is especially useful for the UX. @GoogleAI programmed in “uh huh” and “ums” to simulate the natural pauses in language. 7/10

However, @GoogleAI could work on the friendliness of Duplex’s tone towards the end of a phone call. This isn’t natural conversation at all. It’s rule-based, but it sounds relatively natural. Just make sure you end an AI call with a smile. 8/10

You also wouldn’t want this kind of voice concatenation and speech UI with all of the “ums” in something like Alexa or Google Assistant. Because there, you want an immediate response. But during a conversation where people need to look up things, it works. 9/10

I agree with @anildash and @kevin2kelly that we need to clearly communicate to people when they’re talking with an AI. Some thoughts on that and on Google’s new Digital Wellbeing initiative on Medium. 10/10

medium.com/@caseorganic/g…