RetailMeNot is suing rival Honey over patent infringement, the company announced this week. Honey is the maker of a deal-finding browser extension that helps consumers shopping online get the best price by automatically applying coupon codes at checkout. It also helps with finding the best price on Amazon purchases, doles out digital coupons, offers cash back, helps you track price drops, and more.
According to RetailMeNot’s suit, Honey infringes on U.S. Patent 9,626,688; 9,639,853; 9,953,335; and 9,965,769, which detail technologies related to things like facilitating access to promotional offers, merchant offers, and coupon codes.
“These valuable patents protect RetailMeNot’s pioneering developments in computer-related technologies, and Honey’s unauthorized use of them enables key features of Honey’s website and browser extensions,” RetailMeNot stated in a press release about the lawsuit, which is how Honey first heard the news.
The suit comes at a time when Honey is growing in popularity among online shoppers, while RetailMeNot is getting a bit long in the tooth. The latter has been around since 2006, while L.A.-based Honey was founded in 2012, and is backed by over $40 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. It had a reported 5 million monthly active users as of last fall, and said users were saving an average of $32 per month with its help.
Honey has also dabbled with expanding its deal-finding efforts to other verticals, including as of last year, travel.
Meanwhile, RetailMeNot, a subsidiary of Harland Clarke Holdings, claims $4.8 billion in retailer sales were attributable to consumer transactions from paid digital offers in its marketplace last year, with over $560 million which were attributable to its in-store solution. (The company operates a number of websites, including RetailMeNot.com in the U.S. and .ca in Canada, plus VoucherCodes.co.uk in the United Kingdom; ma-reduc.com and Poulpeo.com in France; and GiftCardZen.com and Deals2Buy.com in North America.)
Reached for comment, Honey called the lawsuit “baseless.”
“We were disappointed to learn of this lawsuit from a press release and are in the process of reviewing the documents with our legal counsel,” said Honey spokesperson, Kelly Parisi, VP, Communications. “The lawsuit is baseless and the claims are irrelevant to how consumers use and experience our services. It’s unfortunate that they’ve taken this tactic to try to thwart innovation that helps consumers save time and money when shopping online.”
Peloton, the unicorn spin (and now treadmill) business that lets users work out via livestreamed classes, has today announced its first acquisition. The company acquired Neurotic Media, a B2B music aggregation and streaming service.
Atlanta-based Neurotic Media was founded in 2001 by Shachar “Shac” Oren, who will become a VP at Peloton serving under Peloton’s Head of Music Paul DeGooyer. The entire Neurotic Media team and offices will remain in Atlanta, continuing operations as a standalone subsidiary serving third-party clients.
Neurotic Media is a white-label distribution and marketing platform, helping brands to influence and engage customers via popular music. Essentially, the company connects a brand with a certain popular song or songs that align with their brand mission.
The idea here is that music is integral to working out. Given Peloton’s focus on bringing a high-quality workout to the comfort of a user’s home (or one of their studios), music plays a big role. But one doesn’t often dabble in the music industry without either 1. experience or 2. loads of money. While Peloton has plenty of cash to go around, Neurotic brings nearly two decades of experience to the Peloton portfolio.
Here’s what DeGooyer had to say in a prepared statement:
Our Members have embraced music as central to the Peloton experience and consistently rank it as one of the top aspects of the brand. The addition of Shac and his amazing team to the Peloton family will help us rapidly deploy new music features we know our Members want, along with some unique innovations we think they’ll love.
Peloton has been making moves as of late. The company launched an expanded iOS app called Peloton Digital, and has announced plans to expand into the UK and Canada starting in Fall. Plus, Peloton opened a new Tread studio in NYC, with plans to open a massive multi-studio space on the West Side of Manhattan next year.
Peloton was founded in 2012 and has raised a total of $444.7 million. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Peloton, the unicorn spin (and now treadmill) business that lets users work out via livestreamed classes, has today announced its first acquisition. The company acquired Neurotic Media, a B2B music aggregation and streaming service.
Atlanta-based Neurotic Media was founded in 2001 by Shachar “Shac” Oren, who will become a VP at Peloton serving under Peloton’s Head of Music Paul DeGooyer. The entire Neurotic Media team and offices will remain in Atlanta, continuing operations as a standalone subsidiary serving third-party clients.
Neurotic Media is a white-label distribution and marketing platform, helping brands to influence and engage customers via popular music. Essentially, the company connects a brand with a certain popular song or songs that align with their brand mission.
The idea here is that music is integral to working out. Given Peloton’s focus on bringing a high-quality workout to the comfort of a user’s home (or one of their studios), music plays a big role. But one doesn’t often dabble in the music industry without either 1. experience or 2. loads of money. While Peloton has plenty of cash to go around, Neurotic brings nearly two decades of experience to the Peloton portfolio.
Here’s what DeGooyer had to say in a prepared statement:
Our Members have embraced music as central to the Peloton experience and consistently rank it as one of the top aspects of the brand. The addition of Shac and his amazing team to the Peloton family will help us rapidly deploy new music features we know our Members want, along with some unique innovations we think they’ll love.
Peloton has been making moves as of late. The company launched an expanded iOS app called Peloton Digital, and has announced plans to expand into the UK and Canada starting in Fall. Plus, Peloton opened a new Tread studio in NYC, with plans to open a massive multi-studio space on the West Side of Manhattan next year.
Peloton was founded in 2012 and has raised a total of $444.7 million. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
If you are reading this, you are free. Slack is down, and it has been for a while. Feel free to invoke the 15 minute rule and take the rest of the day off. Work is canceled.
Or, you know, just keep checking back at the wonderfully alliterative Slack System Status page. The last update, from about 15 minutes ago notes,
Our team is still looking into the cause of the connectivity issues, and we’ll continue to update you on our progress.
The company’s Twitter account is also responding to freaked out users at an inhuman pace.
We're sorry about the trouble, John. We're digging into these issues and hope to have them resolved ASAP.
DevOps — the branch of enterprise IT that involves both products and best-practices for developers to build, test and run apps and other software — is on track to be worth nearly $13 billion by 2025. Now, a startup that is building DevOps tools is announcing a significant funding round to capitalise on that opportunity. Porland, Oregon-based Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs) has raised $42 million in funding in a venture round with a number of strategic and key financial investors.
The company isn’t readily disclosing its valuation — although we are trying to find out — but according to Pitchbook, its last disclosed valuation was in 2014, when it raised $40 million and was valued at $652 million post-money.
But Puppet has grown more than two-fold in the last four years: back then, it had 18,000 customers, including the likes of Google, Twitter, Salesforce and AT&T. Now, it says it has over 40,000 companies as customers, “including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100” using both its open source and commercial products—use Puppet’s open source and commercial DevOps solutions, and it’s expanded internationally and has made a couple of acquisitions (including the startup Reflect earlier this month).
All this would imply that Puppet, which now has raised $150 million to date, is likely valued at significantly more than $700 million, and may well be approaching the $1 billion-mark.
“Our rapid growth and international expansion is a testament to the rising demand for DevOps transformation, software automation and the pressing need for enterprises to navigate the new world of software delivery. That’s why we’ve been so focused on expanding our product portfolio—to empower customers to discover, deliver and operate software across their cloud and containerized environments,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO, Puppet, in a statement. “I’m thrilled by the momentum we’re experiencing. It helps us better support our customers’ journey to pervasive automation.”
The growth of cloud services, and the ubiquity of digitization, have led to a wide slate of functions in a business falling under the category of developer-led operations.
This has, in turn, driven a bigger demand for better processes to run these operations and the infrastructure that they touch. Puppet is not the only company in this area: in addition to large players like Cisco and CA Technologies and EMC, there are startups like Docker, Chef and more.
Puppet’s solutions cover applications, cloud services, containerised services and networking devices, and that mix is part of what is attractive about the company, since many businesses today are not all-in on modern architectures, but are grappling with hybrids of old and new, cloud and on-premises, and so on. (Indeed, the ‘Puppet’ name is a reference to how it works: developers can control the actions of the their applications over the network as puppeteers control puppets, without being seen).
“ServiceChannel has an aggressive technology roadmap. One that not only takes advantage of cloud native capabilities and containerized applications, but also requires modernization of existing, critical systems. Automation is necessary to help us deliver on that roadmap within the constraints of business—safely and at scale,” said Mark Trumpbour, VP of DevOps at ServiceChannel, in a statement.
The funding was led by Cisco, with Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, Singapore’s EDBI and VMWare also participating. Cisco and VMWare are themselves already key players in the area of DevOps (and Cisco already works with Puppet), while EDBI holds investments in a number of companies that are potential customers for the startup.
“Businesses put increasingly massive pressure on enterprise IT—so, it’s important that those IT organizations partner with technology providers with compelling innovation, world-class support and a global community of experts. Puppet has a track record of empowering its customers with all of these critical elements,” said Rob Salvagno, VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, in a statement. “We look forward to working even more with Puppet as the global demand for automation technology and innovation continues to accelerate.”
“In today’s digital age, companies face increasing complex IT challenges dealing with their dynamic and diverse IT infrastructure. Puppet’s automation and management platform transforms how companies manage and improve the efficiency of their IT assets and can help companies in Singapore realize productivity gains while ensuring compliance,” said Swee-Yeok CHU, CEO and President EDBI, in an additional statement. “Leveraging our network, we look forward to helping Puppet scale up its local talent pool to address the region’s opportunities through its APAC Regional HQ in Singapore and to augment Singapore’s digital transformation strategy.”
Signal Media has closed a $16 million Series B funding round for an AI-fueled approach to media monitoring and b2b market intelligence. The UK startup uses machine learning techniques to filter through external information at scale — generating real-time insights for its customers, including for reputation management and decision support purposes.
Its system analyzes more than 2.8M global online, print, television, radio and regulatory sources, translated in real time in over 100 languages from 200 markets — serving up a customized overview of public conversations, market movements and issues pertinent to the client.
The Series B funding round was led by GMG Ventures, an independent VC fund whose limited partner is The Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian news organisation; although MMC Ventures was the largest investor. The round also included a debt facility from Kreos Capital. Other investors include Frontline, Hearst Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures and LocalGlobe.
Signal Media announced a £5.8M Series A at the end of 2016. It also took in debt financing last year, and seed funding back in 2015. And says the total raised to date is north of $27M.
On the customer side, Signal Media has more than 200 clients at this point — including the likes of Allen & Overy, Amnesty International, British Airways, E.ON, TalkTalk, Thomas Cook and Whitbread. While its headcount has doubled to almost 100 people in a year, and it notes it’s more than quadrupled revenues since its Series A raise in September 2016 — claiming 300 per cent year-on-year growth in 2017-18.
While PR and communications is where the company has focused its initial product push, it wants to broaden out into risk management for tax and compliance, and business development in financial and legal services — using the latest investor cash injection to train its AIs on more tasks.
Specifically, says CEO and founder David Benigson, it will be using the funding to build out the AI-driven features of the product.
“Alongside our topics and entities, we’ve built a range of product features, from quote detection, to automatic clustering and auto-translation. We’re already working on a sentiment system that explores the meaning behind entire articles, mentions within an article and tone. We think it’s mad to try and put a numerical -1 to +1 score of ‘sentiment’ around an article — because depending on the reader’s context, a quote in an article could be good and the article could be bad, yet for another reader, the reverse might be true! We’re going beyond this kind of thinking. What kind of good is it? What impact will it have? These are the questions we’re trying to give answers to,” he tells TechCrunch.
“We’re also working on an entirely new way to deliver information to our users by understanding more about their world up front, so the AI can automatically surface contextual articles that are of interest — but that haven’t been actively searched for. Imagine the system itself saying ‘hey, you should really read this, it’s really worth reading considering your interest in X’. That’s what we mean when we talk about the ‘unknown unknowns’ we’re trying to help people see.”
“We’re working with researchers to automate some of the lower-level research work like producing biographies, or company ‘cheat-sheets’,” he adds. “What does this all boil down to? We’re confident we can get to a point relatively quickly where you could be shown an article you didn’t know about, with a competitor or M&A opportunity you haven’t been aware of, give you an immediate idea of what other people think about that competitor, and then give you an instant 2-page summary of that company with all their key information, coupled with some insight into where they sit in a market. It’s really exciting!”
Another focus for the funding is expanding further into the US — where it sees growth potential.
Benigson says a fifth of its revenue currently comes from the market, but he touts the number as “improving daily as we build the team out there”.
The typical Signal Media buyer is currently the head of PR or head of comms in a professional services, financial or legal firm — who’s after reputation management software. But Benigson says increasingly the CEO or wider leadership team is wants to tap into real-time updates for business decision support purposes.
“We always had a vision that Signal would be used horizontally to surface business intelligence,” he says — citing regulation tracking as one of the nascent use-cases it’s interested in. “How does public sentiment and policy impact regulation down the line?”
And it’s certainly true that political risk has stepped up for businesses in all sorts of sectors in recent years — as tech-fueled disruption has generated societal and political pressures, alongside a range of volatile geopolitical events.
On the regulatory tracking front, Benigson says it’s working with a major consultancy on an enterprise-wide application of the service aimed at surfacing global regulatory information.
“The idea is to help risk professionals provide high-quality analysis and insight in real-time, so clients can stay ahead of the change by planning for regulation before it’s even announced. How is regulation X or Y going to unfold? What are the different ways that you could adopt or implement that particular change in regulation?” he explains. “We’re not there yet, but the aspiration of the business is to augment those professionals with decision support.”
Some existing clients have also been using the service to source new business — including for spotting potential M&A targets — and this is another area Signal Media wants to nurture and grow.
“For example, we trained the system to source content on financially distressed firms, and it’s used by the M&A teams at several banks to build their pipeline. For these kinds of clients, the first-mover advantage is crucial and can result in seven- or eight-figure deals, so the real-time alerts from Signal are very important if you’re going to beat your competitors to the punch,” he says.
“Imagine being able to see that the M&A rumors around a prospect are ramping over the course of a morning — calling at 1130 instead of 1201 when they make their announcement public might make all the difference.”
Another business intelligence use-case it wants to serve relates to executive moves — and Benigson says it’s “ramping the training of our AI” to help customers get wind of key job changes before rivals do.
In the reputation management space Signal Media is competing with a range of incumbents — such as Kantar and Cision — plus some newer approaches from the likes of Meltwater and RiskEye, though Benigson argues none of its rivals have “machine learning at their heart”. He names that as its “real differentiator” (vs, for example, the keyword based monitoring used by others).
He also argues it’s “sitting uniquely in the market offering decision support”. “The scope of what we are now able to do in terms of ‘real’ sentiment, automated, readable summaries and contextual analysis is far beyond the traditional scope of reputation management,” he claims.
“We’re also interested in so much more than just reputation and the value of earned media for a CMO (although this is certainly something we help track). My dream is that ultimately we will consolidate insights across risk, reputation, and opportunity back into a single real time dashboard for any C-level professional so that a CEO has as much transparency, clarity, granularity as to what’s happening outside of their organization as inside it.”
While not yet profitable — owing to its focus to date on growth, Benigson expresses confidence in being able to scale the business and achieve profitability down the line. “When we look at the dashboard of AOV, quota, lead time, conversion rate, all of them are trending in the right direction,” he says. “There’s a clear unit-economic pathway to profitability, and we’ll go for it when we’re comfortable about our market position.”
Commenting in a statement, Simon Menashy, partner at MMC Ventures, adds: “We first backed Signal to develop their market-leading AI media monitoring tool, innovating in a space where every large company has a solution but few are happy with it. It’s now become clear that their technology can be applied to solve all kinds of other information problems businesses face. We’re delighted to be significantly increasing our investment and backing Signal’s next phase of growth.”
Codefresh, a continuous integration and delivery platform built for the Kubernetes container ecosystem, today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series B round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Viola Ventures, Hillsven and CEIF also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $15.1 million.
In a market where there are seemingly more CI/CD platforms every day, Codefresh sets itself apart thanks to its focus on Kubernetes, which is now essentially the de facto standard for container orchestration services and which is seeing a rapid growth in adoption. The service promises that it can help developers to automate their application deployments to Kubernetes and that teams will see “up to 24X faster development times.” That number seems a bit optimistic, but the whole point of adoption Kubernetes and CI/CD is obviously to speed up the development and deployment process.
“The meteoric rise of Kubernetes is happening so fast that most toolchains haven’t kept up, and M12 knows it,” said Raziel Tabib, Codefresh co-founder and CEO. “With this latest round of funding we’re going to aggressively accelerate our roadmap and expand our customer base.”
The Codefresh platform hit general availability in 2017 and the company currently claims about 20,000 users, including the likes Giphy.
Editor’s note:This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch earn affiliate commissions.
When life gets busy, cooking is one of the first activities that many forego to get a bit more free time. However, after a while, ordering out and eating sub-par meals gets old. Kitchen gadgets that assist in quickly preparing meals and drinks are not only helpful but essential in creating balance — and time — to conquer the day.
Whether it’s a cold brew coffee maker that saves you money or sous vide gear that’ll upgrade your chef skills, we’ve gathered some of our favorite appliances that are enjoyable to use — and that give you another reason to spend more time in the kitchen.
The OXO Good Grips Spiralizer comes with three blade attachments (from left to right): a ⅛-inch spaghetti blade, a ribbon blade, and a ¼-inch fettuccine blade. Photo: Michael Hession
Spiralizer: OXO Good Grips Spiralizer
Thinking about the steps that go into making a really good salad or vegetable dish is enough to make some grab a take-out menu. If you always jump at the opportunity to cross chopping and dicing fresh vegetables off of your agenda, a spiralizer is a simpler alternative to use when prepping food. The OXO Good Grips Spiralizer is our top recommendation; it creates noodles, ribbons and chips that can be used as garnish or a full meal. After you secure it to your countertop, choose a blade and select your vegetable (or fruit) of choice, this gadget does the majority of the work. Pile your zucchini noodles or butternut squash ribbons high and freeze them to be eaten later in the week.
Personal Blender: NutriBullet Pro 900 Series
Most would agree that the effort it takes to make a smoothie is usually more than worth it. After researching more than 24 models, we tested 10 personal blenders and chose the NutriBullet Pro 900 Series as our top pick. Compared to other blenders we put to the test, it performed best powering through kale, frozen fruit, fresh ginger fiber and dates, as well as a mid-range full-size blender. It’s a great device to have on hand, it pays for itself and quickly produces whatever puree or smoothie you’re in the mood for. Consider an immersion blender for soups and purees that you want to cook in a pot or that call for ingredients that won’t fit in a personal blender.
Photo: Michael Hession
Electric Pressure Cooker: Instant Pot Duo 6-Quart
Aside from being able cook a meal — or the most time-consuming components of a meal — in one pot, the biggest perk of using an electric pressure cooker is finishing the task in a fraction of the time. The Instant Pot Duo 6-Quart has three temperature settings and can be used for slow-cooking and sautéing. New cooks or those intimidated by stove-top pressure cookers can rest assured knowing that electric pressure cookers are safe, durable and easy to use. It’ll come in handy more often than not, as you can make almost anything, including stews, sushi rice, braised meat and even cake.
Photo: Tim Barribeau
Sous Vide Cooker: Anova Precision Cooker Wi-Fi
When it’s time to impress your friends or do something in the kitchen that’s cooler than the norm, breaking out a sous vide cooker will do the trick. The Anova Precision Cooker Wi-Fi is an immersion circulator, which means it simultaneously circulates and heats water in which vegetables, eggs, steak, salmon, Greek yogurt and a list of other foods can be cooked. It clips to the side of a variety of containers and pots, and although it doesn’t require Wi-Fi to work, it enables its timer and temperature to be controlled from anywhere. You’ll need to vacuum seal your food before it’s cooked — and for a finishing sear we recommend using the Bernzomatic TS8000 searing torch.
The OXO brewer makes flavorful, money-saving concentrate, looks good on a counter and is easier to use and store than any other pick. Photo: Michael Hession
If grabbing coffee at your local café has become a routine, making it at home can be a thing, too. There’s no better time than the summer to invest in a cold brew coffee maker if waking up, getting out the door or surviving the day requires a caffeine boost. We like the OXO Good Grips Cold Brew Coffee Maker because it’s compact and has a great design. More importantly, it produced the boldest, most flavorful cup of coffee during testing — plus, its features make brewing and storing coffee easy. Cold brew machines are the best option for iced coffee that’s otherwise diluted and weaker-tasting when it’s made from refrigerated hot-brewed coffee.
This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. Note from Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.
Sonos has always gone its own way. The speaker manufacturer dedicated itself to network-connected speakers before there were home networks and they sold a tablet-like remote control before there were tablets. Their surround sound systems install quickly and run seamlessly. You can buy a few speakers, tap a few buttons, and have 5.1 sound in less time than it takes to pull a traditional home audio system out of its shipping box.
This latest model is an addition to the Sonos line and is sold alongside the Playbase – a lumpen soundbar designed to sit directly underneath TVs not attached to the wall – and the Playbar, a traditionally-styled soundbar that preceded the Beam. Both products had all of the Sonos highlights – great sound, amazing interfaces, and easy setup – but the Base had too much surface area for more elegant installations and the Bar was too long while still sporting an aesthetic that harkened back to 2008 Crutchfield catalogs.
The $399 Beam is Sonos’ answer to that and it is more than just a pretty box. The speaker includes Alexa – and promised Google Assistant support – and it improves your TV sound immensely. Designed as an add-on to your current TV, it can stand alone or connect with the Sonos subwoofer and a few satellite surround speakers for a true surround sound experience. It truly shines alone, however, thanks to its small size and more than acceptable audio range.
To use the Beam you bring up an iOS or Android app to display your Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and Pandora accounts (this is a small sampling. Sonos supports more.) You select a song or playlist and start listening. Then, when you want to watch TV, the speaker automatically flips to TV mode – including speech enhancement features that actually work – when the TV is turned on. An included tuning system turns your phone into a scanner that improves the room audio automatically.
The range is limited by the Beam’s size and shape and there is very little natural bass coming out of this thing. However, in terms of range the Beam is just fine. It can play an action movie with a bit of thump and then go on to play some light jazz or pop. I’ve had some surprisingly revelatory sessions with the Beam when listening to classic rock and more modern fare and it’s very usable as a home audio center.
The Beam is two feet long and 3 inches tall. It comes in black or white and is very unobtrusive in aly home theatre setup. Interestingly, the product supports HDMI-ARC aka HDMI Audio Return Channel. This standard, introduced in TVs made in the past five years, allows the TV to automatically output audio and manage volume controls via a single HDMI cable. What this means, however, is you’re going to have a bad time if you don’t have HDMI-ARC.
Sonos includes an adapter that can also accept optical audio output but setup requires you to turn off your TV speakers and route all the sound to the optical out. This is a bit of a mess and if you don’t have either of those outputs – HDMI-ARC or optical – then you’re probably in need of a new TV. That said, HDMI-ARC is a bit jarring for first timers but Sonos is sure that enough TVs support it that they can use it instead of optical-only.
The Beam doesn’t compete directly with other “smart” speakers like the HomePod. It is very specifically a consumer electronics device, even though it supports AirPlay 2 and Alexa. Sonos makes speakers and good ones at that and that goal has always been front and center. While other speakers may offer a more fully-featured sound in a much smaller package, the Beam offers both great TV audio and great music playback for less than any other higher end soundbar. Whole room audio does get expensive – about $1,200 for a Sub and two satellites – but you can simply add on pieces as you go. One thing, however, is clear: Sonos has always been the best wireless speaker for the money and the Beam is another win for the scrappy and innovative speaker company.
A month and change after I/O, Google convenes a meeting of a few small groups of journalists at an upscale Thai restaurant in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It’s an unusual locale for one of the world’s largest companies.
The tables are cleared out to make room for nine chairs, in three rows of three, facing a large, brightly lit display. To the side, four Google employees sit behind a desk at a makeshift control center. The company is finally ready to offer a little more insight into Duplex, the most widely discussed — and controversial announcement during a rapid-fire keynote.
It’s a 180-degree shift from that sun-drenched day at Mountain View’s Shoreline Ampitheatre. All by design, of course. The cozy New York restaurant makes as much sense as any for such an event, as the company pulls back the curtain on the AI-based reservation service. Thep Thai’s owner insists that such a service would be something of a godsend for the 100-plus reservations the restaurant fields on a daily basis.
For Google, it was clearly time to offer some more transparency into both the purpose for such a system and the workings behind it. The brief demo presented by CEO Sundar Pichai raised far more questions than it answered. The think pieces began to flow, exploring the ethical ramifications for a system that appeared to be designed to fool a business into believing they were talking to a fellow human being.
Duplex represents a rare early look into an ongoing project from a company notorious for playing it close to the vest. But disclosure is key. As with self-driving cars, rigorous real-world testing is required to iron out all of the kinks in the system.
“While we’re not widely launching this feature yet, we’re sharing more information about this technology to provide transparency and encourage feedback,” the company writes in a blog post today. “It’s important that we get the experience right both for people and for businesses, and we’re taking a slow and measured approach as we incorporate learnings and feedback from our tests.”
The nature of Google’s process was likely to get out some way or another, so announcing it at I/O served the dual purpose of getting in front of that narrative and offering an early look at an ambitious project on one of the company’s largest stages.
“What you’re going to hear is the Google Assistant scheduling an appointment at a real hair salon,” Pichai said to tentative applause during the keynote:
Hi, I’m calling to book a women’s haircut for a client. Um, I’m looking for something on May 3. – Google Assistant
Sure, give me one second. – Receptionist
Mm-hm. – Google Assistant
It was here the audience laughed, unbelieving. Then applause. Sure, the audience was in on the joke, but it was still hard to believe that what we were hearing was a purely automated version of Google’s AI assistant. The “mm-hm” was icing on the cake — a subtle vocal tick included to further conversation, all while leaving the other party none the wiser that she was speaking to a ‘bot.
Those vocal breaks, known as “speech disfluencies” in linguistics, are a normal and frequent part of speech, and a key part of the secret sauce that makes Duplex such a remarkable product. Among other things, they’re a polite workaround for the system.
If Duplex is confronted with an uncertain response after requesting a reservation for a party of five, for example, it will reiterate with the slight variation, “um, for five.” That, hopefully, will resolve potential confusion on the part of the receptionist, while including a subtle linguistic tick that lends a further sense of reality to the conversation.
These elements are a very real part of the way Duplex works. I can confirm this, having stood in for the role of the receptionist during a demo at the Thai restaurant. As for the two demos played over the big screen at I/O, they were, in fact, real. Even more interestingly, the company says it informed the businesses after the calls were placed, seemingly to lend an extra level of authenticity to the process.
Duplex was — and still is — very much a work in progress. Among other things, the system didn’t provide a disclosure in the early days, a fact that could potentially violate the “two-party consent” required to record phone calls and conversations in states like Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington and Google’s own home base of California.
Going forward, the system will be confined to those states where the laws make it feasible. That also applies to interstate calls, so long as both sides are covered. “We want to make sure it operates in a way that’s governed by whatever the laws are that are appropriate for that call,” Google Assistant VP, Product and Design Nick Fox says.
While the disclosures weren’t there in the earliest stage, the company has said since the beginning that it intended to add them. The motivation, however, wasn’t due to feared legal repercussions, so much as common robot/human etiquette.
“The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable,” the company wrote in a blog post tied to the announcement. “It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.”
Pressed by the media about what form such “transparency” would ultimately take, a spokesperson for the company added later, “We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex — as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important. We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product.”
In its current form, that plays out thusly:
Hi, I’m the Google Assistant calling to make a reservation for a client. This automated call will be recorded.
Duplex doesn’t let on the fact that it’s an AI — but if you have some familiarity with Google Assistant, you can probably put that part together yourself. It does, however, let you know that the call is being recorded. Google records these conversations for both voice to text processing and quality assurance purpose, so the company can continue to revise and refine the system.
In my test call, I attempt to get Google Assistant to repeat that bit — it’s easy enough to not hear that opening line, particularly when you’ve got the phone up to your ear inside a crowded restaurant. But the AI just barrels on with the reservation. If you miss the disclosure, you’re out of luck — for now, at least. At present, the only way to opt out of being recorded is to just hang up the phone — not the best way to get repeat visitors.
“We do have a mechanism that will say ‘okay, I won’t record you,’ ”Google Assistant VP Engineering Scott Huffman explains. “I think we’re still figuring out what’s the right thing to do there. Is the right thing bow out? To basically throw away the recording?”
Like just about everyone else getting a demo that day, I try my best to throw the system off. Assistant asks for a booking at 6PM. I tell it we’re not open until 11 — this is Manhattan, after all, the best/most exclusive places keep the most insane hours, right? Assistant politely ends the call — or “bows out,” as Google puts it.
The Holy Grail here is attempting to Turing test the shit out of Duplex. If you succeed, one of Google’s human operators will take the controls and land the plane. These human operators are an integral part of testing for Duplex, and Google says it plans to keep them around in some form going forward, to assure that things never get too out of control. How large a group that will ultimately take remains to be seen.
No one in our small group succeeds in invoking a real-life human during our brief chats, though we learn some important insights into the systems’s limitations. For instance, asked to “repeat the last four numbers,” it restates the phone number in its entirety. It’s not a flaw, exactly, but it does show a simple place where the system is pushed to its limitations with regard to the understanding of the the subtle nuances of human conversation.
Asked for the user’s email address, on the other hand, the system simply says it doesn’t have the permission of its “client” to disclose such information, maintaining the whole “assistant” relationship. Google says that, in testing, the system has also gotten tripped up encountering another machine by way of a phone tree. Listening closely because our menu options have changed doesn’t appear to compute just yet.
At present, Google says Duplex is able to complete four out of five fully automated tasks, according to the company. Eighty-percent is pretty good, but Google is pushing to make things better. “We want to make sure that we’re not wasting the business’s time,” Fox says. “We want to make sure throughout everything we do here, that this is good experience for the business and that they’re not getting frustrated talking to an assistant while they’re trying to run their business.”
As announced at I/O, more testing will commence this summer. Over the “coming weeks,” the next round will find Assistant inquiring about business hours. And in the next few months, it will expand to restaurant reservations and hair salon appointments. Unlike those I/O demos, these will occur with “a limited set of trusted testers and select businesses,” who will be in on it.
Companies thus far seem eager to get on-board. As Google notes, according to a customer survey it conducted back in April, “60 percent of small businesses who rely on customer bookings do not have an online booking system set up.”
For users who simply don’t want to pick up the phone, Duplex provides a compelling alternative. For those businesses, it means adding more potential customers. Those who’d rather not get on-board for any number of reasons, on the other hand, will be able to opt out through their Google Business listings (assuming they have one).
The box reads:
Let customers use the Google Assistant to book with you. Also, quickly update your listings by getting occasional calls to confirm your detail.
The system has come a long way since it began life as a jury-rigged demo with an office phone placed gingerly atop a MacBook. Duplex operates through a complex combination of speech to text, text to speech and Google’s own WaveNet audio processing deep neural network. The early demos weren’t live as some speculated, but they were, in fact, real — and things are only getting more impressive from there.
Like it or not, Duplex is coming soon. And the only way to stop it is to hang up the phone.
“The meteoric rise of Kubernetes is happening so fast that most toolchains haven’t kept up, and M12 knows it,” said Raziel Tabib, Codefresh co-founder and CEO. “With this latest round of funding we’re going to aggressively accelerate our roadmap and expand our customer base.”
