Month: June 2018

We've tackled Hearthstone and Warframe, and now our peek behind the curtains at the unsolved mysteries of gaming continues with what could still justifiably be called the world's most popular game: the MOBA mega-hit League of Legends.

These are turbulent times for the monster e-sports giant, with world-class players like Faker playing Taric mid, and AD carries resorting bruisers in the bot lane (I don't know what any of that means, but Ars Senior Space Editor Eric Berger is an avid LoL player and assures me that the above is not gibberish). As the Summer Split gets going, we wanted to go straight to the source for league gameplay to understand where the company has come from and where it's going. In this interview with Greg Street, LoL lead designer at Riot Games, we delved into some of the mysteries behind the world's most popular game, from champion re-works to how many champions are too many, and even into the game's recharged lore.

Enlarge / The end result of Duplex. You ask for a reservation, it makes a phone call in the background, and gets back to you with a result. (credit: Google)

NEW YORK—Evidently, I didn't walk into a run-of-the-mill press event. Roughly two months after its annual I/O conference, Google this week invited Ars and several other journalists to the THEP Thai Restaurant in New York City. The company bought out the restaurant for the day, cleared away the tables, and built a little presentation area complete with a TV, loudspeaker, and chairs. Next to the TV was a podium with the Thai restaurant's actual phone—not some new company smartphone, the ol' analogue restaurant line.

We all knew what we were getting into. At I/O 2018, Google shocked the world with a demo of "Google Duplex," an AI system for accomplishing real-world tasks over the phone. The short demo felt like the culmination of Google's various voice-recognition and speech-synthesis capabilities: Google's voice bot could call up businesses and make an appointment on your behalf, all while sounding shockingly similar—some would say deceivingly similar—to a human. Its demo even came complete with artificial speech disfluencies like "um" and "uh."

The short, pre-recorded I/O showcase soon set off a firestorm of debate on the Web. People questioned the ethics of an AI that pretended to be human, wiretap laws were called into question, and some even questioned if the demo was faked. Other than promising Duplex would announce itself as a robot in the future, Google had been pretty quiet about the project since the event.