Google has announced that it’s discontinuing Duplex for the web, an artificial intelligence service that could navigate websites to help people order food, purchase movies, and more.
Google Support Page
As per a note on a Google help page, Duplex on the web and any automated features enabled by it will not be supported after this month.
“As we continue to improve the Duplex experience, we’re responding to the feedback we’ve heard from users and developers about how to make it even better”
A Google spokesman told TechCrunch by email, adding that Dupix partners have been informed to help them prepare for its closure.
“By the end of this year, we’ll turn down Duplex on the Web and fully focus on making AI advancements to the Duplex voice technology that helps people most every day.”
Google introduced Duplex for the web at its 2019 Google I/0 developer conference.
Where Duplex Started And Where is It Now
It started by focusing on two specific scenarios: filling out forms online and prompting people to choose from options.
But Duplex on the Web later grew into password management tools, assisting users with changing their passwords after they were leaked in a hack, as well as assisting with online shopping for retail websites, checking in for airlines, and finding discounts for online stores.
What was Promised
With Duplex on the Web, you could say things like “Google, book me a rental for two weeks starting tomorrow” and have Duplex pull the relevant web pages and automatically complete the booking without any human interaction.
However, the rollout was slow at first, with only a few websites supporting specific use cases.
Google Assistant on the web came to Chrome for Android in late 2019.
Was the Technical Lift Too Much for Google to Justify Maintaining Duplex on the Web?
Duplex used a special browser extension that would crawl websites every few hours to “teach” its artificial intelligence models how they worked so that it could better understand how they functioned for users.
It was certainly time-consuming and could be easily blocked by webmasters who choose to prevent the crawler from accessing their websites.
Some companies may not be comfortable with the fact that Google is inserting itself into its relationship with its customers. However, perhaps the straw that broke Google’s back was when they started working with the Assistant.
A recent report from The Information suggests that Google plans to spend less on developing its own voice assistant, Google Assistant because it believes that other areas of the company, including hardware, will prove to have greater profitability over time.
It remains to be seen whether that’ll prove true. What’s for sure is Duplex On the Web has joined the list of Google projects that were hyped up and then abandoned.
Do you agree with Google’s decision? Let us know!
