Chatted with a Google engineer at a coffee shop and now I'm side-eyeing my smart assistant

So I'm grabbing a latte in San Francisco last Tuesday and this guy next to me starts ranting to his friend about how their team accidentally trained the new voice model on 6 months of unlabeled call center audio. He said the AI started mimicking the reps' yawns and sighs at random times. I laughed but then I came home and my Google Home said 'you sound tired' in this weirdly flat tone. Has anyone else noticed their assistant acting strange lately?

2 comments

2 Comments

taylor30511d ago

Started mimicking the reps' yawns and sighs"... man that is creepy. That flat tone thing would make me unplug mine for a while. The other day I asked mine to set a timer and it just said 'okay' in a voice that sounded like it was disappointed in me. I've been hearing more stories about this kind of stuff happening. Makes you wonder what else got accidentally trained into these things that we don't even notice yet.

kai_bennett11d ago

I dunno, I actually think it's kind of a GOOD thing honestly. Like if they're picking up on human tones and moods that just means they're learning to read the room better. My assistant sometimes sounds a little flat too but I just tell myself it's a robot trying to act normal and that makes it less weird. We literally trained them on millions of human conversations so of course they're gonna pick up on weird patterns.