SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Google has demonstrated an AI assistant that can make phone calls on your behalf, speaking to the human on the other end of the line. The company showed off the capability by playing a recording of a phone call it claims was between its chatbot and a hair salon:
Onstage at I/O 2018, Google showed off a jaw-dropping new capability of Google Assistant: in the not too distant future, it's going to make phone calls on your behalf. CEO Sundar Pichai played back a phone call recording that he said was placed by the Assistant to a hair salon. The voice sounded incredibly natural; the person on the other end had no idea they were talking to a digital AI helper. Google Assistant even dropped in a super casual "mmhmmm" early in the conversation.
Pichai reiterated that this was a real call using Assistant and not some staged demo. "The amazing thing is that Assistant can actually understand the nuances of conversation," he said. "We've been working on this technology for many years. It's called Google Duplex."
There is already a debate about whether this is a good idea:
The selfishness of Google Duplex
Google's AI sounds like a human on the phone — should we be worried?
Google Duplex: Good or Evil?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @01:46PM
It could also be that the Luddites suffered a massive capitalist propaganda campaign to portray their protest over low wages and the alienation from production inherent in factory labor (sometimes expressed contrapositively with terms such as workmanship, seems to me) as an anti-technology movement, which misses the larger impetus of engaging in acts of sabotage (given the etymology suggesting the word is derived from the act of throwing wooden shoes into factory equipment¹) being the desire for a workers' revolution.
¹ Wikipedia disagrees [wikipedia.org] with this etymology: "It is sometimes said that some workers (from Netherlands for some, canuts from Lyon for others, luddites in England, etc.) used to throw their wooden shoes, called "sabots" (clogs) in the machines to break them, but this is not supported by the etymology."