Google Duplex might be a milestone in Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has been around for decades and we all, at some point, have spoken to a customer service computer. And every time we did so, we were very well aware of talking to a ‘robot’ as it never sounded like a real human being. You could hear the strange intonation of random words being pasted together saying: ‘The next train to Amsterdam is leaving at 8.30pm’. You would make sure you’d speak clearly so your ‘Amsterdam’ wouldn’t be confused with ‘Azerbaijan’.
Even up to know, there is a strange kind of satisfaction in Siri giving you a list of massage places when you are asking for the nearest Thai restaurant. It’s a confirmation that there isn’t a human being living in your phone.
But now there’s Google Duplex. Thursday 8 May Google’s CEO showed examples of calls made by Google’s virtual assistant making appointments that sound creepily like a real person, up to the ‘uhm’ and ‘hmmm’. It seems like massive amounts of human conversations have been organized and analysed by Google to create a robot that reacts in a very similar way a human would. Of course these 2 conversation can be heavily edited or well scripted (which the CEO says they aren’t) but soon we should be able to test this out for ourselves.
If it really works like the demo suggests, this could be an extremely important breakthrough in AI on which we have been waiting since the Turing Test was created in 1950. The famous British computer scientist wondered if computers would be able to think like humans. He concluded that if a computer can pass a test where it converses with a human, without the human being aware that he’s talking to a robot, artificial intelligence would have reached a critical point.
But now there’s Google Duplex. Thursday 8 May Google’s CEO showed examples of calls made by Google’s virtual assistant making appointments that sound creepily like a real person, up to the ‘uhm’ and ‘hmmm’. It seems like massive amounts of human conversations have been organized and analysed by Google to create a robot that reacts in a very similar way a human would. Of course these 2 conversation can be heavily edited or well scripted (which the CEO says they aren’t) but soon we should be able to test this out for ourselves.
If it really works like the demo suggests, this could be an extremely important breakthrough in AI on which we have been waiting since the Turing Test was created in 1950. The famous British computer scientist wondered if computers would be able to think like humans. He concluded that if a computer can pass a test where it converses with a human, without the human being aware that he’s talking to a robot, artificial intelligence would have reached a critical point.
Watch the introduction of Google Duplex and judge if we are there already. (warning: it IS slightly creepy)
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