Google CEO Sundar Pichai presents the company’s new AI voice assistant Duplex during the Google I/O conference on May 8. AFP
我们不少人很容易就能辨别出是否是一台电脑在给你打电话。在电话那头告诉你获得免息贷款或者邀请参加客户调查之前，电脑的声音就已经相当明显了。这也让人们很容易就挂断电话 —— 毕竟那只是一台电脑而已。
But Google Duplex, an artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistant, has shown that computers are able to “conduct a natural conversation with a human over the phone and complete simple real-world tasks,” reported tech site Wired.
但据科技网站Wired报道，谷歌人工智能语音助手Duplex能够与人类进行自然的电话沟通，并完成现实中的简单任务。
On May 8 during its annual developer conference Google I/O, the company showed Duplex making phone calls and having full conversations. First, it called a hair salon to make an appointment, before calling a restaurant to make a reservation.
在今年5月8日举行的谷歌年度开发者大会(Google I/O 2018)上，谷歌公司用Duplex打电话并进行了完整的对话。它先给美发店打了个预约电话，然后再给一家餐厅打电话订位。
As CNET noted, not only has Google changed the typical computerized voice, but the company has taken “extra steps to disguise the system to sound more like a human”.
正如科技资讯网站CNET所指出的那样，谷歌不光改变了典型的电脑语音，还“进一步让该系统听起来更像人类”。
Duplex comes with imperfections – “umms” and “uhhs” – and uses typical human phrasing such as “Oh, gotcha.”
Duplex 会使用一些如“嗯”、“啊”之类的停顿语气词，以及常见的人类使用的措辞，如“啊，明白了。”
As a result, “the receptionists on the other end of the call have no idea they are conversing back and forth with AI,” commented CNET.
所以，“电话另一头的人并不知道他们在和人工智能交谈，”CNET评论道。
Some see Duplex as quite a breakthrough – it will be able to help humans cut down on boring tasks. But for the rest, it “straddles a fine line between being convenient and deceptive,” as Wired wrote. People have a hard enough time knowing whether news is real or fake, or what photos are to be trusted. And now, we may not be able to trust our own ears.
一些人将Duplex视为一大突破 —— 它能帮助人们完成枯燥的工作。但正如Wired所写的那样，还有一些人认为，它“跨越了便利和欺骗的界线”。人们现在已经很难分辨新闻和照片的真伪了。而如今，我们或许也无法相信自己的耳朵。
Google also mentioned that soon, Duplex will be able to imitate the owner’s voice. While this is a great step forward in AI, it also raises many concerns. For example, students could use Duplex to call their school to pretend they’re sick by using their mother’s or father’s voice.
谷歌也指出，很快，Duplex就能模仿主人的声音。尽管这是人工智能向前迈进的一大步，但它也引发了诸多担忧。比如，学生们可以用Duplex模仿父母的声音，给学校打电话谎称病假。
Since people are shocked by the fact that a machine can imitate a human so well, Google has promised that in the future the voice will tell the listener that it’s not a real person.
人们对于机器能够如此惟妙惟肖地模仿人类感到震惊，鉴于此，谷歌承诺将来的语音将告知对方所听见的声音并非真人。
According to Alexander Rudnicky, a researcher of human-computer speech interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, technology like this is something people are only going to become more aware of. “We just assimilate this interaction into our culture,” he told Wired.
美国卡内基梅隆大学人机言语互动研究人员亚历山大·鲁德尼克认为，人们对这样的技术会越来越了解。“我们只是将这样的互动融入我们的文化，”他在接受Wired采访时说道。
