Ask HN: Is Google recording our calls for Google duplex?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17039753

by chintanb • 8 years ago

37 17 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is google recording our every call to train their AI models for google duplex ? e.g. "Mm-hmm"

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

My impression is Google's lawyers are not dumb enough to let Google publicly announce they're illegally recording calls in a two-party consent state: Presumably their demos were recorded with permission or staged.

But I was definitely curious how they could operate Duplex without running afoul of existing laws. It's possible Google believes they are not "recording" the call when they send audio to and from their AI.

They may be transcribing calls to text, which arguably isn't "call recording", it is just writing down verbatim what was said in the call. They likely have enough voice data from other sources, like Google Assistant on people's phones and Google Home that they can avoid recording calls explicitly.

seba_dos1• 8 years ago

I don't think that's actually your phone doing the call.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

No, but the issue is, in many places it would be illegal for Google to record a call where they called someone else.

chintanb• 8 years ago

I agree that they might be "writing down" the call. Is it legal ? or We accidentally signed up for this when we are using android phones

patmcc• 8 years ago

>Google publicly announce they're illegally recording calls in a two-party consent state

Why wouldn't they just run these tests in a one-party consent jurisdiction? From a quick google only 12 states are two-party. Nothing about the demo indicated to me it was done in California.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

Also a possibility. Google can provide one-party consent since Google is initiating the call.

astro_robot• 8 years ago

I believe OP is asking about the training model data for Google Duplex (i.e. did Google record calls between two people for training data).

kyrra• 8 years ago

GOOG-411 likely gave Google a large datasource for voice training.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

hprotagonist• 8 years ago

I believe this has been explicitly confirmed, but I can't find a source at the moment.

nappy-doo• 8 years ago

As a Xoogler, that is my understanding. Similarly, all the Google Assistants and (now) Google Homes out there are also being used.

virtuallynathan• 8 years ago

Yep: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

And also all of the time people talk to Google Home, Assistant, etc. Google Voice voicemails, and perhaps calls? Also, all of the audio and any recorded calls posted to YouTube.

chaoticmass• 8 years ago

Ah, I remember using this service a lot in the pre-smart phone days.

joshred• 8 years ago

Also Google voice, voicemails.

realusername• 8 years ago

They have all the youtube data plus millions of calls they could buy from call-centers to train if that's not enough, I doubt they need to resort to record calls.

forgot-my-pw• 8 years ago

They probably already asked the businesses first, then just did the test at random times.

textmode• 8 years ago

"To obtain its high precision, we trained Duplex's RNN on a corpus of anonymized phone conversation data." - Yaniv Leviathan

kwerk• 8 years ago

If you use GCP Enhanced Speech to Text models you’re contributing to a central model:

https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/enhanced-models

Ask HN: Is Google recording our calls for Google duplex?

Related Stories