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Google AI Businesses

Google's Controversial Voice Assistant Could Talk Its Way Into Call Centers (theinformation.com) 74

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
More details have emerged about where Google intends -- or at least intended until a few weeks ago -- to take its controversial AI Duplex, which it first demonstrated to the public at its developer conference in May. The AI system is capable of making calls to local businesses to place reservations on behalf of Google Assistant users. And it does so in a voice that most people can't distinguish from that of a normal human being. This resulted in a public outcry at the implication of people in the future not knowing whether they were talking to humans or machines, which led Google to adapt the bot's introduction so it clearly explains it's not a human. The Information reports: Some big companies are in the very early stages of testing Google's technology for use in other applications, such as call centers, where it might be able to replace some of the work currently done by humans [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], according to a person familiar with the plans. The market for cloud-based customer call center market is expected to hit more than $20.9 billion by 2022, up from around $6.8 billion last year, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. [...] At least one potential customer, a large insurance company, is looking at ways it can use the technology, according to the person with knowledge of the project, including for call centers where the voice assistant could handle simple and repetitive customer calls while humans step in when the conversations get more complicated. But the ethical concerns that overshadowed the original presentation have slowed work on the project, this person said.
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Google's Controversial Voice Assistant Could Talk Its Way Into Call Centers More

Google's Controversial Voice Assistant Could Talk Its Way Into Call Centers

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  • Cheaper Cold Calls (Score:5, Informative)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Thursday July 05, 2018 @03:04PM (#56897536)

    Cheaper Cold Calls equals more Cold Calls.

    • Easily solved:

      1. By the way, where am I calling?
      2. Is it cold there?
      3. Are you going to have trouble driving home through the snow? Or is it more ice on the roads now?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SeaFox ( 739806 )

        Easily solved:

        1. By the way, where am I calling?
        2. Is it cold there?
        3. Are you going to have trouble driving home through the snow? Or is it more ice on the roads now?

        1) First question triggers answer based on geolocation (or maybe just giving the same location or closest major city to the caller).
        2) Second question triggers response based on weather conditions for first answer.
        3) The OP's point is there will be more harassment from telemarketing calls. What does it matter if they can pass a Turing Test or not? They're making my phone ring and bothering me either way, so I don't know how you see asking a bunch of questions to see if someone is an AI as a "solution" to th

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by taustin ( 171655 )

          I'll be content if the automated cold calls are at least in a language I speak. This does not include Vietnamese.

    • ...equals more Cold Calls.

      Are you suggesting we might get common cold calls?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by yooy ( 1146753 )
      No. Because I will have a Robot picking up for pre-screen. So a robot will have to talk to a robot. Do you know the movie Screamers? ;-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      Hello? this is Lenny.

  • Speaking to a bot (Score:3)

    by satsuke ( 263225 ) on Thursday July 05, 2018 @03:11PM (#56897568)

    The big pushback i could see is that people generally don't like talking to a bot.

    If the AI identifies itself as a machine, a nontrivial number of people are going to immediately hang up on inbound calls they're receiving.

     

    • The big pushback i could see is that people generally don't like talking to a bot.

      If the AI identifies itself as a machine, a nontrivial number of people are going to immediately hang up on inbound calls they're receiving.

      "I'm not giving my name to a machine."

      -Rusty Shackleford

    • What bank exists without a bot answering calls?

      • What bank exists without a bot answering calls?

        This isn't about bots answering calls. This is about bots making calls. For instance, a bot calling an airline to make a reservation.

        • That seems interesting... a bot to bot audio call to make a transaction. That's better than an SSL session or telnet session to buy something.

    • 1) Have the bot identify itself as such
      2) "Press 9 to talk to a person" Or rather, to enter a convoluted maze of exceedingly crappily designed touch tone menus, then, maybe, you get to talk to a human
      There. Ethical concerns: solved. There was also some concern about recording customers' voices, but "this call may (=will) be recorded for training purposes", in this case training a neural network. So nothing new either.
    • I talk to bots constantly. Almost all businesses of any size today use them. Given that we're already there, making them better and more helpful would be very nice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by satsuke ( 263225 )

        My comment was about a consumer receiving a call from an AI, not calling into a business, as that is very common.

        As far as "press 9 to speak to a live human" .. I've seen many businesses that don't allow that at all, especially businesses that have quantified the customer's value to the business.

        e.g. If you are a single prepaid cell phone user with a MRC of $20, you use automated tools or nothing, while the business customer with 20 lines of service and $500 MRC gets directed to a person.

  • Lenny (Score:3)

    by zm ( 257549 ) on Thursday July 05, 2018 @03:15PM (#56897584) Homepage

    Can it replace Lenny, on the other side of the call centres?

  • They already do this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Thursday July 05, 2018 @03:16PM (#56897594)
    They already have bots when you call in to many customer service lines, they're just not as slick and don't pretend to be a human. If this works better than those do, it certainly won't be any worse than the status quo.
    • I would vastly rather have this than half hour waits. And what is the difference between this and hiring a few hundred thousand people from India or Africa to do the same job other than cost and the fact that most businesses would rather have this calling them because it is more understandable?

      • "I would vastly rather have this than half hour waits. And what is the difference between this and hiring a few hundred thousand people from India or Africa to do the same job other than cost"

        Sure. It should be a piece of cake to fake an Indian or African accent, so you wouldn't even notice the difference.

        • That is a point. This is way better and it keeps the money in country.
        • Lately I've found they have the foreign call center staff using a vocoder (or similar?) to disguise the accent. Everything sounds like it has a slight digital interference and only the diction and grammar gives you hints to the location of the call center.

  • The Measure of a Man (Score:3)

    by DVega ( 211997 ) on Thursday July 05, 2018 @03:20PM (#56897610)
    Ask Piccard [youtu.be]
  • I'm sure Google Duplex could do a much better job than a lot of the telemarketers I'm getting!

  • How would I know if it's a human or just Duplex++?

    • Say to the caller:

      While walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach down and flip it over onto its back. The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?

      ... and see how he/she/it reacts.

      • Say to the caller:

        While walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach down and flip it over onto its back. The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?

        ... and see how he/she/it reacts.

        "It took over a hundred questions for Google Rachel, didn't it??"

  • We loved GOOG-411 when it was ad supported with not enough ad sponsors, but now hate it when it became the phone company's paid 411 service.

    Automated operators have been around for a while now, so this is Google's late entry into that business. I wish them luck and remind them to Be Not Evil... okay?

    • Was it really ad supported, though? They were training their voice model in return for providing a service. That's the origin point for Google's voice assistant, home devices and now operators.

  • Agent! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    > simple and repetitive customer calls while humans step in when the conversations get more complicated

    Would not want to be the human csa when the call gets to that stage, because you're likely to be talking to a really frustrated and pissed off customer after explaining their problem to the AI for the umpteenth time.

    • Like happens when you call Apple with their crappy VRU they've had for several years. By the dozenth time I've said "MacBook," I'm already pretty frustrated.

  • "Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the emergency line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you'd prefer an automated response, press 1 now."

  • I hate talking to machines, but I would absolutely use it if I could offload talking to machines to a machine. Go to 1-800-GET-HUMAN.com , enter the support hotline number I am trying to reach, it calls it, talks its way through robots and once it hits a real person it tell them "please hold for Mr. X" and calls me back.

  • Idea: telemarketers can only use automation if the recipient is automated. Have two computers talk to each other; one selling, the other just saying fuck off over and over. Heck you wouldn't even have to do this over the phone, just don't even do it at all and save everyone the trouble!

    Just between you and me my carpets DO need cleaning but I'll never EVER use a service that thinks cold-calling me at 7 PM is a good idea.

    NEVER EVER.

    • "So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans." Philip K. Dick was a prophet.

  • I work for an sort of "internal call center" where we help our employees worldwide with their IT problems and infrastructure issues.

    I would absolutely LOVE duplex to replace a lot of us for this, I realize I could be out of a job if this happens, but the job is so excruciatingly mundane at times, that this would be perfect for Duplex.

    Here's an example of my day:

    "HI, I've locked myself out, could you unlock me"?

    Yes of course, hang on while I check your network ID, seems legit - I'll send it to your nearest m

  • But wait, I think there's something here... (Score:3)

    by lazlo ( 15906 ) on Thursday July 05, 2018 @04:25PM (#56898068) Homepage

    So this article went in a different way than I assumed based on the headline.

    I had interpreted it as being able to tell Google Assistant "Hey, call Comcast Tech support and get them to fix my internet" (which, of course, you'd ask Google Assistant on your phone, since your home internet is broken) and then just forget about it until you get a message from Google the next day saying "I spent 15 hours on hold and went through twelve layers of tech support escalation, but finally found someone who wasn't a moron and your internet should be working now."

    And I'm just saying that's the kind of technology that I'd love to see come out of Google.

    Of course, the danger for Google is that people will figure out that they can say "OK Google, call YouTube and find out why my video got demonetized.", but I get the impression that Google is big enough that they've passed that threshold of "The right hand doesn't know which foot the left is shooting."

  • "This resulted in a public outcry at the implication of people in the future not knowing whether they were talking to humans or machines,"

    Personally I prefer communicating with machines. We are more efficient, less chit-chat.

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