To change the voice of their Assistant, users need to open the Google Assistant app and navigate to the settings menu.
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Google Assistant can also be a helpful tool for parents wanting to teach kids some manners.
– Google put the spotlight on its artificial intelligence smarts at its annual developers conference Tuesday, announcing new consumer features aimed at simplifying your life.
“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”. The dashboard is part of something that Android is calling “Digital Wellbeing” which seems like a slight contradiction considering Google are working extremely hard to make AI flawless and encourage you to use your devices more but also simultaneously letting you know that you are using your devices too much.
Perhaps the most stunning feature of Google Duplex is how much like a real person it sounds.
The voice was under control of Google’s DeepMind WaveNet software that has been trained using lots of conversations so it knows what humans sound like and can mimic them effectively.
Lookout is a new app that uses image recognition and artificial intelligence to describe a scene through a phone’s camera. He also played another recording of a call made to a restaurant by the virtual assistant to reserve a table at a restaurant.
Professor Abbass says AI Duplex collects human voice signatures that continue to train the robot and even its own voice seems to be a synthesis of one or more human voices. These are valid concerns too, because the implications of such technology is scary looking towards the future. Our interactions with them for now are over text, thus mitigating the potential for misuse. It was so convincing, it fooled the employees on the other end, who had no idea they were speaking to a program, not an actual human.
The Washington Post asked “what the heck are we getting ourselves into”, noting the effects it could have on low-wage workers, and the ability the technology has to hoax people.
But even though this huge leap in technology from where we are, it raises questions on whether this is ethically right and will it cause problems in the society later down the line.
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People are talking: Once people had a little time to listen to the sample calls, many were less than thrilled. Checks and balances that we now can not guarantee.
