Google vocal assistant is getting more and more like the human voice
Google is continuously evolving, just like technology which is exponentially advancing. In a few years, it’s going to be so powerful that it will take over all our capabilities and expectations. That’s what will happen with Artificial Intelligence which is already making great strides. This technology is developing in several fields but is in one of the vocal assistants where we can notice well the revolution. If we have been already impressed with Siri, Cortana, and Alexa; Google Assistant is going to do a step forward. We are talking about the possibility to call someone by phone and make appointments. That’s what Google Duplex does, a kind of AI capable to simulate almost perfectly the human voice. It can call for us and handle a conversation so appropriately to sound indistinguishable to the interlocutor who may believe to talk to a real person.
Characteristics
From initial tests, it appeared how Google Duplex managed to handle a conversation on its own, even in a non-standard conversation. In addition, the assistant speaks simulating some speech characteristics such as interjections (mmm, ah, ect…), pauses which depend on the information. Pause is also used to take time when the AI is analyzing data. Intonation also plays an important role because it can express insecurity when Duplex didn’t understand what the person said.
To be able to simulate perfectly a conversation, Duplex uses a neural network that progressively learns and improves itself, thanks to machine learning. As a matter of fact, it is continuously trained by a large number of conversation samples, so that it can process different cases of questions and answers. At the moment, Duplex works for specific conversational settings, but in future it could be used in other contexts.
Pro and Cons
We are in front of something extraordinary. Since we have an increasingly frantic life, it seems that the only way to have more time is to rely on someone\something else for our little and simple tasks. Isn’t it risky to delegate too many things (many of these, maybe, important) without knowing what’s happening around us?
Will we delegate so much that AI will be our shadow government with all our personal data? And what if this AI will pass itself off as us and decide for? Sci-fi? We’ll see.
Anyway, even for things not very important, Duplex could make reservations without letting us know. At that point, who will we blame? Now it seems that Google has battened down the hatches, making its assistant introduce itself before making any reservation. However, it seems to be possible to stop calls from the assistant. This doesn’t exclude the possibility for it to call without introducing itself. In the future, maybe it could even simulate our voice. These are the upcoming ethical issues.
For further information visit Google AI Blog
