this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
407 points (90.5% liked)
Technology
63313 readers
6373 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe, but by the 2nd call the AI would be more time efficient and if there were 20 venues to check, the person is now saving hours of their time.
But we already have ways to search an entire city of hotels for booking, much much faster even than this one conversation would be.
Even if going with agents, why in the world would it be over a voice line instead of data?
The same reason that humanoid robots are useful even though we have purpose built robots: The world is designed with humans in mind.
Sure, there are many different websites that solve the problem. But each of them solve it in a different way and each of them require a different way of interfacing with them. However, they all are built to be interfaced with by humans. So if you create AI/robots with the ability to operate like a human, then they are automatically given access to massive amounts of pre-made infrastructure for free.
You don't need special robot lifts in your apartment building if the cleaning robots can just take the elevators. You don't need to design APIs for scripts to access your website if the AI can just use a browser with a mouse and keyboard.
Sex?
The thing about this demonstration is that there's a wide recognition that even humans don't want to be forced to voice interactions, and this is a ridiculous scenario that resembles what the 50s might have imagined the future as being, while ignoring the better advances made along the way. Conversational is maddening way to get a lot of things done, particularly scheduling. So in this demo, a human had to conversationally tell an AI agent the requirements, and then an AI agent acoustically couples to another AI agent which actually has access to the actual scheduling system.
So first, the coupling is stupid. If they recognize, then spout an API endpoint at the other end and take the conversation over IP.
But the concept of two AI agents negotiating this is silly. If the user AI agent is in play, just let it access the system directly that the other agent is accessing. An AI agent may be able to efficiently facilitate this, but two only makes things less likely to work than one.
The cleaning robots even if not human shaped could easily take the normal elevators unless you got very weird in design. There's a significantly good point that obsession with human styled robotics gets in the way of a lot of use cases.
The API access would greatly accelerate things even for AI. If you've ever done selenium based automation of a site, you know it's so much slower and heavyweight than just interacting with the API directly. AI won't speed this up. What should take a fraction of a second can turn into many minutes,and a large number of tokens at large enough scale (e.g. scraping a few hundred business web uis).