Google Duplex and the (short) Turing Test

Click this link and listen to the brief conversation. No cheating! Which speaker is human and which is a robot?

I wrote about a "strong" version of the Turing Test in this old post from 2004:

When I first read about the Turing test as a kid, I thought it was pretty superficial. I even wrote some silly programs which would respond to inputs, mimicking conversation. Over short periods of time, with an undiscerning tester, computers can now pass a weak version of the Turing test. However, one can define the strong version as taking place over a long period of time, and with a sophisticated tester. Were I administering the test, I would try to teach the second party something (such as quantum mechanics) and watch carefully to see whether it could learn the subject and eventually contribute something interesting or original. Any machine that could do so would, in my opinion, have to be considered intelligent.

AI isn't ready to pass the strong Turing Test, yet. But humans will become increasing unsure about the machine intelligences proliferating in the world around them.

The key to all AI advances is to narrow the scope of the problem so that the machine can deal with it. Optimization/Learning in lower dimensional spaces is much easier than in high dimensional spaces. In sufficiently narrow situations (specific tasks, abstract games of strategy, etc.), machines are already better than humans.

Google AI Blog:

Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone

...Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

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.

Here are examples of Duplex making phone calls (using different voices)...

I switched from iOS to Android in the last year because I could see that Google Assistant was much better than Siri and was starting to have very intriguing capabilities!