On the first
day of Google's annual conference for developers, the company showed off a
robot with a voice so convincingly human that it was able to call a salon and
book a haircut – never revealing that it wasn't a real person making the call.
CEO Sundar
Pichai demonstrated the new AI technology on Tuesday at the Google I/O
conference, playing audio of a female-voiced bot speaking with a receptionist
over the phone, and then a male-voiced bot making a restaurant reservation. The
bot peppers its speech with "um", "uh", and "mmm
hmm" in order to imitate the tics and rhythms of human speech.The new
technology is called Duplex, and its aim is to carry out natural-sounding
conversations so that Google's virtual assistant can accomplish tasks over the
phone on users' behalf. But the demo showed a product so real-seeming that it's
also raising concerns about AI that can purposely fool humans into thinking
they're interacting with a real person.
In a blog
post describing the technology, Google says Duplex "is capable of carrying
out sophisticated conversations and it completes the majority of its tasks
fully autonomously, without human involvement." Duplex is slated to start
rolling out this summer within Google Assistant, and make appointments and reservations
or check business hours – tasks that sometimes require a phone call.Google says
Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained
within a specific subject, and that it can't carry out general conversations.
(But that didn't stop people from imagining the uncomfortable conversations
they'd offload. "Hey Google: Tell Marcus he's the father," Casey
Johnston joked at The Outline. "Hey Google: Tell my landlord I'll send the
rent uhhh next week.")
While Google
wowed developers with the realness of the bot's speech, many observers
immediately took issue with how the technology apparently tricked the human on
the line."Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human not only
without disclosing that it's a bot, but adding 'ummm' and 'aaah' to deceive the
human on the other end with the room cheering it... horrifying. Silicon Valley
is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing," tweeted Zeynep
Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who
studies the social impacts of technology.
"As
digital technologies become better at doing human things, the focus has to be
on how to protect humans, how to delineate humans and machines, and how to
create reliable signals of each—see 2016. This is straight up, delilberate
deception. Not okay," she added.Entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash agreed:
"This stuff is really, really basic, but: any interaction with technology
or the products of tech companies must be exist within a context of informed
consent. Something like #GoogleDuplex fails this test, _by design_. That's an
unfixable flaw."
The engineers
who designed Duplex address the issue only vaguely in the company blog post.
"It's important to us that users and businesses have a good experience
with this service, and transparency is a key part of that," they write.
"We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand
the context. We'll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming
months."
Google vice
president of engineering Yossi Matias told CNET that the software will likely
tell the person on the phone that they're talking to a virtual assistant —
though that didn't happen in the conversations showcased on Tuesday.
The concept
known as the "uncanny valley" notes that adults often find it creepy
to interact with a robot that seems very nearly – but not quite—human. But
Google's new technology pushes that question of creepiness to a new level: What
if we don't even know it's a robot we're talking to?
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