Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its suite of AI-powered services that navigated sites to simplify the process of ordering food, buying movie tickets, and more. according to a Note on a Google support page, Google on the web and any automation features enabled by Google will no longer be supported starting this month.
Google introduced Duplex on the Web, an outgrowth of its call automation Duplex technology, during its 2019 Google I/O developer conference. To start with, it focused on a couple of limited use cases, including opening the website from a movie theater chain to fill in all the necessary information on behalf of a user, pausing to request options like seats. But Duplex on the Web later expanded to passwords, helping users automatically change passwords exposed in a data breach, as well as assisted checkout for e-commerce retailers, flight check-in for airlines and the automatic search for discounts.
Duplex's promise on the web was that you could issue a Google Assistant command like "Reserve me a car from Hertz" and have Duplex open the relevant web page and automatically fill in details like your name, car preferences, travel dates and payment information (using information from Gmail and Chrome autofill). But rollout was slow at first, with only a limited number of supported sites and partners for specific use cases. Android was the only platform from which Duplex could be used on the web, and the service came to Chrome for Android as "Assistant in Chrome" in late 2019.
Duplex on the Web to reserve a car.
Was the technical effort too much in the end for Google to justify keeping Duplex on the Web? Maybe. Like in the Support page From Duplex on the Web, Duplex used a special user agent that crawled the sites as often as several hours a day to periodically "train" against them, adjusting the AI models to understand how the sites were designed and performed from the perspective of of the user. It was surely resource intensive and could easily be tripped up if site owners chose to block the crawler from indexing their content.
No doubt some brands were uncomfortable with the idea of Google also standing between them and their customers. But perhaps the straw that broke the camel's back was the cutbacks on the Assistant side of Google's business. According to a recent report in The Information, Google plans to invest less in the development of Google Assistant for devices not made by Google, spurred by the idea that other areas of the company, such as hardware, will prove more profitable in the long run.
Time will tell if that is the case. But what is certain is that Duplex on the Web has joined the infamous hall of highly advertised and then abandoned Google products.
