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Yesterday, at I/O 2022, Google showed off a new digital banana capability that's meant to ameliorate your life by making simple boring phone calls on your behalf. The new Google Duplex characteristic is designed to pretend to be man, with enough human being-like functionality to schedule appointments or make similarly inane phone calls. Co-ordinate to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the phone calls the company played were entirely real. You lot can make an argument, based on these audio clips, that Google actually passed the Turing Test.

If y'all haven't heard the audio of the two calls, you should give the clip a listen. We've embedded the relevant function of Pichai's presentation beneath.

I suspect the calls were edited to remove the place of business, but autonomously from that, they audio like real telephone calls. If you listen to both segments, the male voice booking the eatery sounds a chip more similar a person than the female does, just the gap isn't large and the female person voice is still noticeably improve than a typical AI. The female person speaker has a rather robotic "At 12PM" at one betoken that pulls the overall presentation down, simply past that, Google has vastly improved AI speech communication. I suspect the aforementioned technologies at work in Google Duplex are the ones we covered near six weeks ago.

So what's the Turing Exam and why is passing information technology a milestone? The British computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Alan Turing devised the Turing examination as a means of measuring whether a figurer was capable of demonstrating intelligent beliefs equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of a human. This broad formulation allows for the contemplation of many such tests, though the general test example presented in discussion is a chat betwixt a researcher and a computer in which the estimator responds to questions. A third person, the evaluator, is tasked with determining which individual in the conversation is human and which is a machine. If the evaluator cannot tell, the machine has passed the Turing exam.

The Turing test is not intended to be the final word on whether an AI is intelligent and, given that Turing conceived information technology in 1950, patently doesn't take into consideration later advances or breakthroughs in the field. At that place accept been robust debates for decades over whether passing the Turing test would correspond a meaningful breakthrough. But what sets Google Duplex apart is its first-class mimicry of human speech communication. The original Turing test supposed that any discussion between estimator and researcher would take identify in text. Managing to create a vocalism facsimile close enough to standard man to avoid suspicion and rejection from the visitor in question is a significant feat.

As of right now, Duplex is intended to handle rote responses, like asking to speak to a representative, or simple, formulaic social interactions. Even so, the program's demonstrated capability to deal with confusion (equally on the 2d call), is still a significant stride forrad for these kinds of voice interactions. As artificial intelligence continues to improve, voice quality will improve and the AI volition become better at answering more and more than types of questions. Nosotros're obviously still a long mode from creating a witting AI, merely we're getting better at the tasks our systems can handle — and faster than many would've thought possible.

Update 5/18/18 3:40pm:This entire demo has since been thrown into question.