At Google I/O 2018 developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed off some updates coming to Google Home and Assistant.
He explained about “Google Duplex” which can make phone calls for you and talk to the person on the other end to schedule appointments and make reservations.
One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.
The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that.
Google Duplex’s conversations sound natural thanks to advances in understanding, interacting, timing, and speaking.
At the core of Duplex is a recurrent neural network (RNN) designed to cope with these challenges, built using TensorFlow Extended (TFX). To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex’s RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data.
The network uses the output of Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, as well as features from the audio, the history of the conversation, the parameters of the conversation (e.g. the desired service for an appointment, or the current time of day) and more.
News Source: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html
