Why AI is So Brilliant and So Stupid - InformationWeek

AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, but the results are mixed. While chatbots and digital assistants are improving generally, the results can be laughable, perplexing and perhaps even unsettling. Google's recent demonstration of Duplex, its natural language technology that completes tasks over the phone, is noteworthy. Whether you love it or hate it, two things are true: It doesn't sound like your grandfather's AI; the use case matters. One of the striking characteristics of the demo, assuming it actually was a demo and not a fake, as some publications have suggested, is the use of filler language in the digital assistant's speech such as "um" and uh" that make it sound human. Even more impressive, (again, assuming the demo is real), is the fact that Duplex reasons adeptly on-the-fly despite the ambiguous, if not confusing, responses provided by a restaurant hostess on the other end of the line. Of course, the use case is narrow. In the demo, Duplex is simply making a hair appointment and attempting to make a restaurant reservation. In the May 8 Google Duplex blog introducing the technology, Yaniv Leviathan, principal engineer and Yossi Matias, VP of Engineering explain: "One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively.