Ride the Lightning

Google’s Duplex AI Sounds Like a Real Human: A Good Thing or Just Plain Creepy?

May 15, 2018

As Naked Security reported, Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently demonstrated an experimental new feature of Google Assistant.

It consisted of two ordinary-sounding one-minute voice conversations, one to book a hair appointment, the other to make a restaurant reservation. If you haven't heard the conversations, you really need to carve out time to listen.

The unusual aspect of those conversations – which Google said were not staged – is that in both one of the voices was a computer powered by its Duplex AI technology capable of talking and responding to human beings on the other end using natural language. Duplex passed the Turing Test for me– it was definitely able to pass as being a real human being. Google got it right, right down to the human "umms" and pauses.

Google will start offering Duplex to a small number of Voice Assistant Android users this summer, which they'll use to make simple reservations like the ones in the demo.

There were definitely questions from the dark side: Might criminals use voice AI to deceive people? What are the implications of people delegating social interaction to machines? Will it put millions of service industry workers out of a job?

Most importantly, do people have a right to know they are talking to a machine? For now, Google is designing the feature with disclosure built in.

But if people talking to Duplex will be told they are talking to a machine, why make it sound so convincingly human? I am convinced that Google (and others) see a world where disclosure may not be built into the system.

Technically, Duplex is a combination of systems including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and neural network 'deep learning'. For now, the technology can only be used for a small set of tasks, but inevitably this will expand quickly, which in turn will lead to calls for more rules and regulation.

For myself, if I am talking to a machine, I want to know that I am talking to a machine. I expect there will be a hue and cry to mandate that disclosure by law.

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