I think most of us are familiar with the Turing test—a computer attempts to trick a test subject into thinking that it is a person (the subject is presented with messages from both the computer and an actual human being and she must decide which ‘messenger’ is human).
According to the University of Toronto, the Turing Test, also known as “The Imitation Game,” originally involved a man, woman, and a ‘judge’ (the test subject) of either gender. The judge was prompted to select which messenger was a man. Similarly to the role of the computer in the more recent version of the Turing Test, the woman’s job was to try and convince the judge that she was actually the man.
This means that it was the job of the psychologists and programmers behind the computer “contestant” to find distinctly human characteristics and speech patterns to make the Imitation Game interesting (and not an obvious win for the human contestant). Similarly, it was up to the woman in the original test to try and imitate characteristics and speech patterns that she deemed distinctly male.
Programmers developed software to attempt to beat the Turing test, tackling the task with language databases and intelligence sentence-crafting algorithms. However, today I came across Kurt Wagner’s article on recode.net that featured a YouTube video from Google’s channel. I have added the video into the blog post, but to summarize, Google’s Duplex assistant not only takes on the personality of a laid-back, confident assistant (with the diction and voice of the robot); it fills in spaces in conversation with “mhmm” and “um,” just as a human would in a candid conversation. It’s very convincing if you listen to the video, and the technology really approaches uncanny valley territory (which, if you are unfamiliar with the term, means that it may seem a bit unsettling, given its close but not-quite-there similarity to natural human speech).
When I heard the Google Duplex reservation call, I immediately thought of the Turing test (granted, the video is more an advertisement than a demo and perhaps not an entirely accurate depiction of the technology’s capabilities). However, if the technology does work as well as it did in the video, I am sure some psychologists would have endless fun creating an audio version of the Imitation Game. The test subject could take a phone call from both the human contestant and Google Duplex assistant and choose between the two. I think this new technology could really hold its own in a situation such as the Turing test, and could really prove how far artificial intelligence and machine learning have come.
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Sources
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html
https://www.recode.net/2018/6/27/17508166/google-duplex-assistant-demo-voice-calling-ai