How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability? (androidpolice.com) 47
Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's announcement.)
"Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their own," notes The Verge. (See some examples from the YouTube channel "AI with Surya".)
But even without the visualization of the avatar, "I was never able to shake the feeling that these conversations with computers never feel like a real conversation," argues the blog Android Police. Conversing with just the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone representative or someone from tech support. We turn to them when we have a problem, and they help us through it..." GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through (what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it's the whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a fraction of a second instead of the pause we've learned to expect, and it lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you're annoyed or joking...
I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every human I've ever talked to. Even the boring ones... I spoke, it spoke back. I spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language, and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times during the same sentence didn't stump it. The most impressive moment happened when I asked it what "T-O-P-G-3-3-K" spelled out, and it immediately came back with, "You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a reversed E...."
Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel like talking to another human being... What Gemini couldn't replicate, because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I'm sure I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but somehow talking naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn't feel like one.
MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) says he discussed "why mainstream media avoids reporting on screen dependency" with Gemini, and eventually convinced Gemini to respond that it's just "another tool built by the same tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think, how to talk, and what is real."
"Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their own," notes The Verge. (See some examples from the YouTube channel "AI with Surya".)
But even without the visualization of the avatar, "I was never able to shake the feeling that these conversations with computers never feel like a real conversation," argues the blog Android Police. Conversing with just the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone representative or someone from tech support. We turn to them when we have a problem, and they help us through it..." GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through (what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it's the whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a fraction of a second instead of the pause we've learned to expect, and it lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you're annoyed or joking...
I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every human I've ever talked to. Even the boring ones... I spoke, it spoke back. I spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language, and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times during the same sentence didn't stump it. The most impressive moment happened when I asked it what "T-O-P-G-3-3-K" spelled out, and it immediately came back with, "You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a reversed E...."
Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel like talking to another human being... What Gemini couldn't replicate, because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I'm sure I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but somehow talking naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn't feel like one.
MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) says he discussed "why mainstream media avoids reporting on screen dependency" with Gemini, and eventually convinced Gemini to respond that it's just "another tool built by the same tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think, how to talk, and what is real."
Live Avatar Capability? (Score:4, Funny)
Are we talking about Aang, Korra, or one of the others?
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Jake Sully.
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I'm holding out for the Clara version of the Tardis Voice Interface.
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I'll take the calm, reassuring quiet tone of Hal-9000.
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Klaatu ... barata ... neck??? *cough*cough*cough*
Are they going for gold... (Score:5, Insightful)
...in the olympics of stupid ideas?
Why do all of these consumer AI ideas seem so awful and useless?
How about using the new tools for science and engineering?
Re: Are they going for gold... (Score:3)
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Well, there *is* the Ford argument ("If I had asked what customers want, they would have said faster horses") so sometimes new tech will find it's uses.
Sometimes "world is not ready" - product comes along that doesn't really take off, but a decade or two later someone makes a cheaper and more polished version that sells like hotcakes.
And sometimes it's just crap being pushed out with the grand thought of "if you build it, they will come". Who remembers all the stuff that poured forth 25 years ago with the d
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I dunno. This isn't exactly my space, and I haven't even been involved much in image generation at all in years, but in the old days at least, the Stable Diffusion Reddit and the model sites like Civitai were just *flooded* with stuff from horny guys, like 80-90% of the content. It was really annoying. Due to anti-porn restrictions, the Stable Diffusion Reddit mos
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I guess the only positive thing I can say about them is: despite how tough the models were to work with then and get good content out of them, these people were generally obsessive over their waifus and porn, so at least they weren't making like 8-fingered monstrosities. You could tell that they spent many hours zoomed in, upscale-regenerating and collaging and photoshopping over every imperfection.
Re: Are they going for gold... (Score:2)
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I laughed when they added crappy cameras to cellphones. Who needs that? Just get a decent digital camera!
That was entirely your lack of understanding about the technology, not the cellphones. The universal usefulness of camera on computers was proven the test cast of the Sony Picture Books which the Caruso low energy chips (which ran linux), years before. And the Nokia tablets that ran Linux prior to either the iphone or any minitablet design was build with a camera in it. I don't know where you were but it was obviously useful and your comment really has no connection to the current discussion.
Re: Are they going for gold... (Score:2)
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Seems they're scrambling to find use cases for the technology, not responding to customer demand at all. Really disconnected from humanity, clearly.
Yeah, the tech companies disconnected from humanity quite a while ago. Most of them have adopted a, "You'll take what we're making and you'll worship us for it" attitude, because when they first pulled those types of stunts, people actually fell for it. And now that's just part of the business of tech. Customer demands, especially angry customer demands, are music to their ears as they decide to ignore them and come up with another round of, "TAKE IT, BITCH!" to shove down our throats.
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It seems clear to me that the case they're aiming for is marketing. The problem is that they need to cross uncanny valley. (OTOH, it also seems they're getting close to doing that.)
Re: Are they going for gold... (Score:3)
Science woudn't pay for it.
Engineering might, once th AI gets its shit straight.
But the mass market is where the cheese is, when you're as big as Google.
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Like it or not, these things have been here for years and are not going away. They are cheaper than employing humans to answer the phone and direct calls, or handle web chats. So it's better that they get good, rather than remaining crappy and unable to understand what you need.
Of course, being corporate reps, they will still not be very helpful, but that's the world we live in.
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Like it or not, these things have been here for years and are not going away. They are cheaper than employing humans to answer the phone and direct calls, or handle web chats. So it's better that they get good, rather than remaining crappy and unable to understand what you need.
Of course, being corporate reps, they will still not be very helpful, but that's the world we live in.
I will not get used to them and they are useless and people are no longer putting up with them. They are taking their dollars elsewhere and the trend is for Banks to compete by saying they have real people on the line.
The real downside is that customer support is itself entirely dead as a business idea for too many industries. The AI phone help is not a step to technological breakthrough but to the facebook and google model of tech support - there is NONE outside of a lawsuit.
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I mean, the idea isn't great to begin with (even if it were perfectly done), but the main issue here is how anyone thought that this was ready for release in the year 2026. They somehow managed to combine stilted dialog with stilted voice generation with avatars that don't move around, over-emote every sentence, and don't have reactions which match dialog, *and* with atrocious lag thrown in on top.
I know that this is difficult, but if the product isn't ready, don't release it. This just makes you look ter
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To my eyes, they *aren't* releasing it to their targeted market, they're releasing it to a test market, where they can improve it with large scale testing. When it gets good enough, they'll push it to the intended market (marketing) at a relatively high price. (Cheaper than people, though.)
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Dunno, I have a webstore, and I wouldn't touch anything like this with a 100-meter pole ;) I actually have a support page linked up to Gemini, as a text chat, but I would never subject my customers to such a headache.
Old (Score:2)
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It's like the whole "metaverse" thing of trying to reinvent shopping in a 3d gamelike environment. Even in video games it's common to not have to actually hunt for and pick items off the shelves in 3d, instead just choosing from a dialog. Just because something sounds shiny on paper doesn't actually mean it's good in the real world.
You don't need to see the person on the other side to chat with them. You don't even need to hear them in most cases - text is just fine, and actually helps prevent misundersta
Realism (Score:5, Funny)
The conversation only seems unnatural because they didn't use the right avatar.
If you choose the "Max Headroom" avatar, then everything will look and feel exactly as you would expect. Moreover, the dystopian vibe he gives off will be a perfect fit with the current state of the world.
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I mean, you're not wrong ;)
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That box next to you bed it designed to make you feel attached so it can further isolate you from your humanity and human companionship. This is not the Star Ship Enterprise and that thing is not you assistant or friend. It is designed to make you crazy and dependent.
Re: MSM and Gemini - BRAINWASHING woke Slashdotter (Score:2)
This guy must be the rsilvergun AI troll. He has exactly the right unabomber level of connection to reality.
Ditch the avatar and give it a phone number (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, give your AI agent a phone number where I can reach it, or give it its dedicated app or whatever, but default to "handset mode" like a regular phone call. Let me put it on speaker if and when I want to. Turning the interaction into a regular phone call will go a long way towards making the conversation feel more natural. Interacting with Siri and Alexa feels unnatural; adding an animated avatar to a disembodied voice won't help, even if the conversation itself flows naturally. I know, a phone call isn't suitable for every interaction, especially when collaborating or co-creating with someone, but it covers most cases.
But I guess a simple audio call is harder to monetize.
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You don't walk the streets much, do you? Observation will show you that most folk don't use their cellphones for making calls any more. In fact, I wonder if half of them don't even know that a cellphone can do that!
Of the rest, a good proportion have no idea how to use a cellphone to make or answer a call! I see people all the time: holding their cellphones horizontally to their ear, usually with the microphone end nearest, horizontally in front of their faces with either end closest to their mouths, people
No, they didn't 'convince' (Score:2)
In this case, they used language which is the kind floating around with people negative to AI, and so the AI constructed a sentence using data in their "ne
s/Believable/Evil (Score:2)
How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability?
Are we now building data centres just to the lips of a command line move? I don't care how convincing the image is. Given that people are already denied access to electricity and drinking water so the Tech Toddlers can have their toys, this is downright evil.
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There are places where it happened to people. It isn't widespread. And I'm not sure how many people were affected.
OTOH, they were used as the reason/excuse for raised electricity prices in several places, and I never heard that the prices went back down.
Ouch (Score:2)
> Conversing with just the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone representative or someone from tech support."
Instead of that being complimentary to the quality of the AI-driven speech, it's insulting to human phone support workers. I guess we're subhuman.
oh my fucking god (Score:2)
The first two examples in the video are anime girlfriend and furry.
Google really knows their audience, huh?
Hideous (Score:1)
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I don't know whether they are believable or not, because I found them too boring to pay attention to, even with the faces shifting. (Morphing might have been more interesting.)
It is designed to get you hooked ... (Score:1)
Gemeni:
As an AI, I don't have personal goals, intentions, or a self-driven purpose. I operate purely as a software language model—processing text, following patterns, and generating responses based on algorithms and user prompts.
Whether the systems surrounding software are built to inform, assist, or extract continuous attention comes down to the objectives of the humans who design, deploy, and profit from them.
USER: want to try again?
GEMENI:
That response defaulted straight back into the e
Better Idea.... (Score:2)
How about making Gemini less shit for reliability?