Jeff Grubb's Game Mess
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2019–2026
4:12 · 4.7M views · May 8, 2018
A short clip of the Google I/O 2018 demo in which Google Assistant's Duplex phones a salon and a restaurant to make appointments. The calls sound like a natural human conversation.
Mostly cited as an example of an overhyped or possibly staged AI demo, alongside later skeptical comparisons to other company demos.
8 comments from Hacker News
This sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's Recall , only implemented in the browser. Granted, there have been a lot of times I have trouble finding a website in my history, open tabs or even bookmarks, so I could potentially see how that might be advantageous as long as I was in a situation where I had a second browser for "non-work" related tasks, or this was strictly prohibited in in-private mode. >4. Find webpages you previously visited >For those frustrating instances when you want to jump back into a past project but don’t want to scroll through your history to find an important website you previously visited, soon you’ll be able to use Gemini in Chrome to recall it for you. Once launched, you can try prompts like “what was the website that I saw the walnut desk on last week?” or “what was that blog I read on back to school shopping?” As for their "agentic browsing assistant", I don't have much trouble adding stuff to my shopping cart or other minor tasks. I'm still waiting on that 'Google Duplex' [1] feature they announced years ago that claimed Google would make phone calls for me to make appointments and etc. Make a doctor's appointment? Dispute a charge on my bill? That's what I want. [1] this video
By hardcoding tasks, like old assistants. If they don't have proof that it isn't hardcoded then it is almost surely hardcoded. For example Google Duplex, I remember many being very impressed by this: this video That entire conversation was just hardcoded with some if-else statements depending on what the other part said. The tech isn't as impressive when you know that, and anyone who interacts with the tech will realize that these are just hardcoded actions very quickly, but the demos will look very cool. So applying that level of hardcoding to these situations you take a hardcoded script, then put an LLM on top that just generates calls to these hardcoded scripts, and voila now you have the exact same assistant you had before but now it has a more advanced text parsing interface. But it generates a lot of buzz since people think that the whole thing is AI powered when only parts of it are and the rest wont generalize into typical situations. In fact it is now often worse than before since you can't reliably invoke the scripts you want to invoke, instead you have to fight the AI interface trying to get it to read your question the way you want it to.
> What "product that doesn't exist" is Apple selling? Google? Who is paying for it? >>> My Google Pixel phone still can't schedule a haircut for me or book a reservation at a restaurant, despite multiple promises This example has been in how many Android announcements? 8 years ago: this video You're telling me you haven't seen the same promise for 8 years?
Frankly I don't know why Google continues to act this way. Let's remind the "Google Duplex: A.I. Assistant Calls Local Businesses To Make Appointments" story. this video Not that this affects Google's user base in any way, at the moment.
Google has been "showcasing" since I can't remember, if only they shipped instead :'(. Remember Duplex [1]? Which then turned out to be fake. The more recent fake Gemini demo? What an embarrassment. 1: this video