i don't know what end goal you think they're training for, but duplex feels enough like an end goal to me. I know everybody likes to say everything google does is all about training the AI, but they have to be training for something.
This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work. making a reservation is the beginning of a sale. being able to book a reservation at any arbitrary restaurant with no extra work on the restaurantuer's part makes google ads more valuable. They can make money off this quite directly.
> This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work... They can make money off this quite directly.
The interviews I've read point to an 80% success rate - hugely impressive, but 20% of interactions requiring human intervention is still a _very_ large, expensive staff hungry contact center to run when you are Google scale, for a product that ultimately doesn't really bring in any direct revenue. Each time Duplex fails in its current form, a human operator has to step in to finish the call.
Even Google are telling us not to expect this to ship in anything anytime soon.
From Ron at Ars' demo:
“We’re actually quite a long way from launch, that’s the key thing to understand,” Fox explained at the meeting. “This is super-early technology, somewhere between technology demo and product.”
My point wasn't to say it's a product now, but rather that it is will be a product if everything pans out. The supposition was that this is just another way for Google to collect data, I believe that it's more of a way to use data than a way to collect data.
Google 411 could have been considered an end goal too. It too was concrete and monetizeable. Instead it was actually a way to get a whole lot of natural language voice samples. When it stopped being useful in that regard, they didn't turn around and try to monetize it, they just killed it.
Well, they could do what amazon does with aws lex, and offer it as a SaaS product for others to build "something" out of it, adding it to their gcloud stuff.
This is a "something". it's a concrete, monetizable, and useful application of their AI work. making a reservation is the beginning of a sale. being able to book a reservation at any arbitrary restaurant with no extra work on the restaurantuer's part makes google ads more valuable. They can make money off this quite directly.