Comment by joshuak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuak | Hacker News Reader

I, like everyone, hate telephone support. I don't like it mostly because of it's lack of effectiveness, and the very strong impression it leaves that the company doesn't care at all. I'm also one of the people that finds Duplex deeply disturbing (Does anyone not find it disturbing?! That's even more disturbing!)

However, I can see this working quite well for help desk services if the paradigm is flipped. That is if I end up speaking with my electronic assistant who then appears to negotiate on my behalf with the company. As apposed to me calling an unknown entity. It may in reality be the companies service, or even infrastructure that my electronic assistant is running in, but the impression to me would be I'm speaking to my already familiar electronic assistant.

The benefits of this are many, and only possible with something like Duplex. In addition to familiarity, technical support can be delivered at the right customer knowledge level skipping past insulting time wasting support like "is it plugged in?". Also a "continuity of care" model can be adopted by companies to provide a continuation of the relationship in the context of prior interactions. The list goes on.

This might in fact be the one service that is a bad enough experience, that I would gladly welcome our new robotic overlords.

> This might in fact be the one service that is a bad enough experience, that I would gladly welcome our new robotic overlords.

I think this does not solve the underlying problem. Sorry if this is out of scope but lets talk about the recent blender on YouTube thing. Often, it is not that the person answering the phone is an idiot but rather the person answering the phone does not have the authority to do anything. I've received bad bills from T-Mobile where the process goes like:

1. see bad bill in the mail 2. Call T-Mobile and wait 3. Get a person and explain the situation 4. Person looks and agrees that line item shouldn't be there and removes it. Person also says they put a note to prevent this from happening again. 5. Rinse and repeat.

I refuse to believe that multiple people over the course of a year are all incompetent. I must conclude there was either something intentional (bill stuffing?) or the staff was not empowered to fix the situation. Will we empower our new robotic overlords to "fix" the situation? How far will business capitulate on business rules? What happens when something is not right and needs an override? Previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645

> I refuse to believe that multiple people over the course of a year are all incompetent

Those are your words, homie. The parent simply called out call-centers for being ineffective, which I would agree, given my own experience with them. I would contend that the workers are generally skilled and agreeable, rather the hop-skip-dance that needs to take place every time a call-center is used, is painful and ancient. Imagine a situation where your own digital PA already knows your account number, address, phone, etc., allowing you to simply provide a courteous hello before asking your question.

> I'm also one of the people that finds Duplex deeply disturbing (Does anyone not find it disturbing?! That's even more disturbing!)

Why? You presumably exchange text with chatbots all the time, and get mail/slack etc updates from your CI bot as well. Do they bother you?

you get phone calls / talk to people in shops who claim to have your interests in mind when they steer you to one product over another. Does that disturb you?

Oh now I get it, the people who are not disturbed by this contemplate that it'll only be used in innocuous contexts in which we already accept an unknown voice. That's not intended to sound sarcastic, I genuinely mean that now I understand the reasoning.

However, the reason these are not comparable is proof of work/investment. Presumably Duplex can or will soon be able to make millions of calls for any purpose whatsoever. Unlike a human being with a foreign accent perhaps or other alerting auditory factors Duplex massively reduces the cost of experimental manipulation.

One of the most successful hacking techniques is phishing. Its success is directly tied to how compelling it is at counterfeiting a legit communication.

And this does not even touch on larger institutional deception.

You just gave me a great idea on how to finally get my congress critter to listen to me!

It sounds like your concerns are based on what some eventual form of this technology might become. Duplex is incredibly domain-specific, and will only make calls on behalf of Google, not random phishers.

Being worried about Duplex in its current form is like being worried about Siri becoming conscious. Your concerns about malicious AI voices are valid, but that eventual technology will be nothing like Duplex in its current form, and it's still a long way off

I'm not talking about AI

The outcomes I speak of, which are nothing compared to all potential exploits, are possible with the existing Duplex technology, in that they do not happen it is only in Google's good gatekeeping. That is too thin a standard for me.

Duplex only works because it was highly optimized for specific domains, like booking haircuts and booking tables. Every conversation in these domains pretty much goes the same way. If you go off the standard reservation script, it falls apart.

I suppose Duplex could maliciously attempt to book a bunch of fake reservations, but the technology behind it really can't do much more than that

Also, I'm not really sure what you mean by "Google's good gatekeeping". 3rd parties have no control over Duplex, other than initiating specific tasks through Google Assistant. If Duplex does anything malicious, it would be because Google went rogue, and there would obviously be massive legal and PR consequences for that.

I feel like Google as a whole are aware this could be used for phishing, and will have methods preventing malicious use.

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