Technology - Google News

Should you be worried that Google wants to do all your chores?

Posted: 12 May 2018 07:32 AM PDT

Google Duplex will call salons, restaurants, and pretend to be your personal human. USA TODAY

Google will one day be able to drive a car for you. It can help you compose your e-mails and finish your thoughts now, automatically. And now, in a spooky view of the future, it can even make phone calls on your behalf.

Google's display of artificial intelligence and what computers are now capable of this week at its I/O developer's conference was both the most exciting breakthrough in tech of the year, and the scariest.

Via a program it calls Duplex, it showed how a smartphone app could replicate a human voice, down to the "umms" and "ahhs" in pauses. The bot sounded more real than the person it was calling. (Listen to my Talking Tech podcast here for audio examples.)

While the idea is a practical one — saving us the hassle of making phone calls to set up reservations at restaurants and hair salons — Google's breakthrough has the potential to conjure for some pretty bad stuff.

Consider that in its demo, Google essentially tricked the person on the other side of the phone call into thinking they were talking to a fellow human being.

Fittinly, while the Internet giant was hailed for the tech breakthrough, it also was criticized for pulling a form of high-tech "con" since at no point did Google in its recorded demo let the human on the other end know they were talking to a robot.

For three days, Google basically ignored growing criticism, presumably because it was worried that announcing "Hello, you are talking to a Google robot" would result in a hangup.

But by late Thursday, Google was forced to bow to pressure and agreed to further develop the software with a "disclosure" of its robotic nature.

That's good news. But will it go far enough? And really--what was Google thinking? After all the outcry about privacy in the past year and Internet sites that go too far with our data, Google didn't have the smarts to see this one coming?

Think about what might happen when rogue actors get ahold of this technology and start making realistic, human-sounding calls on their behalf? You know it will happen. What will Google do to prevent that? Or now that the genie is out of the bottle, is it too late, as YouMail's Alex Quilici suggested to me this week, when he called Google's tech innovation "a massive Christmas present to robocallers."

Remember, it was just two years ago that our elections disrupted by Russian tech experts in state-sponsored attacks via Facebook. (Read below for more on just how bad Russia played Facebook, in our news roundup.)

The upshot of Duplex, should it work as advertised, is that Google has just put one foot forward and two steps backward for our lives, says Jim Boerkoel, a professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

"If Google drives us to work, then we just added another hour of work to our day, because we'll be expected to work during the commute," he says. "If we don't have time to make appointments, and now the robot can do it for us, we'll use the time we just freed up for more work. This goes both ways. Because we have more time, we'll be expected to do more."

But for all the heavy talk about a coming future where tech runs amuck, let's get real for a moment. Artificial intelligence is creepy, but it could also be great, making our lives better and saving us time. And it's not about to take over our lives. Not yet.

Google can't eat for us, do our exercise or take over most of our jobs. We still need to get dressed in the morning —no computer will do that for us. But who knows, give the company time, it could get there, right?

Google plans to begin its Duplex test in the summer.

In other tech news this week

Net Neutrality rules rolled back, June 11. The Federal Communication Commission's rules preventing Internet service providers from blocking or slowing legal traffic, or charging for faster delivery of some content, passed with much hubbub in 2015, will be history on June 11. The new rules requires ISPs to disclose any blocking, throttling or prioritization of their own content or from their partners. But they aren't prevented from doing so.

Google updates the Android mobile operating system. Several new features were announced at the I/O developer's conference, including tools to improve battery performance, new gestures for navigation and the ability to set time limits on phone usage.

Congress released iRussian purchased ads on Facebook from 2016. Facebook says the ads were purchased by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency to sway public sentiment. Some of the more than 3,000 ads denounced Donald Trump, others his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton. Many of the ads, placed by Russians posing as Americans, didn't endorse a specific candidate but spread inflammatory messages on sensitive subjects such as immigration and race to amplify fault lines in American life, targeting users from specific backgrounds and tight races in key states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia. Elizabeth Weise went through every one of the ads.

This week's Talking Tech podcasts

Behind Elon Musk's crazy earnings call: Analyst and investor Gene Munster sat in for us on Monday's episode to give some color on the controversial call with the Tesla founder.

Rating the Assistants: We posed 150 questions to Google, Alexa and Siri. Listen in to hear which won answered correctly more often.

We pose 150 questions to Siri, Google and Alexa to see which one has more correct answers. Watch TalkingTech with Jefferson Graham USA TODAY

Google's scary new plan for robotic calls: Listen to just how human like the bot from Google sounds as it attempts to make reservations at a restaurant and hair salon.

BeLive.TV says live video and alive and well. We chat with the founder of the live video service from the Facebook F8 conference, where live video got barely a mention this year.

More on Google's Bots: Google's bot announcement opens so many questions. Does Google need to inform the caller that they are speaking to a computer? How do we feel about robots impersonating humans and getting away with it in real life? We weigh in on this episode.

The skinny on Mother's Day flowers online: They're as good as sold out for Sunday delivery, as we report on the podcast.

This weekend's timelapse video, from beautiful Santa Cruz, California.

Thanks for visiting with us again for our take on the week's tech news. Have you subscribed to the newsletter? Click this link to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Be sure to check out the daily #TalkingTech podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to podcasts, and look for me on Twitter (@jeffersongraham) YouTube and Instagram

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Classic Castlevania-Style Prequel Game For Bloodstained Revealed, Releases Very Soon

Posted: 12 May 2018 07:34 AM PDT

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is getting its own 8-bit style companion piece from Inti Creates. The retro platformer specialists promised a smaller prequel game as a stretch goal during the Kickstarter campaign, and now the studio has announced the first details. It will be called Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, and it's coming on May 24.

Curse of the Moon features four playable characters familiar to fans of its Castlevania inspirations: Zangetsu, who uses a sword; Miriam, with a whip; Alfred, the alchemist; and Gebel, a shapeshifter who can turn into a bat. You start as Zangetsu and gain more allies as you progress, and you can swap between them at will. The more allies you have, the more versatility in combat, and you can keep progressing through a stage even if you die as long as another character remains. Stages will also have areas that only particular characters can access.

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Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon - Official Announcement Trailer

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A code will be sent for free to Kickstarter backers who contributed above the requisite amount during the campaign, and it will be available for everyone else as a standalone purchase for Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, 3DS, and Vita for $10.

It's a pretty clear throwback to Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, a clever thematic way to make a prequel for Ritual of the Night, which is inspired by Symphony of the Night. That game, meanwhile, is still planned for release sometime this year. We're likely to hear more about exactly when at E3 2018.