it goes to the Google graveyard
Google is discontinuing Duplex on the web. Duplex is a service that made it easier to order food, buy movie tickets and more. The artificial intelligence-powered tool is no longer supported as of this month.
Duplex Web
A Google spokesperson tells Techcrunch about it. “As we worked on the Duplex experience, we looked at the feedback we received from users and developers on how we can make it even better. By the end of this year, we will be shutting down Duplex on the Web and fully focusing on making AI enhancements to the Duplex speech technology that helps people most every day.”
Duplex Web hasn’t gotten old: the tool was announced in 2019. Initially, it was mainly intended to open a website of a certain cinema chain and fill in the information for a user (up to the choice of seat, because people always like to do that themselves). However, it was later expanded to include passwords, including alerting to data breaches and being able to quickly change those passwords to secure an account as quickly as possible. In addition, check-in for flights, automatically find discount codes and checkout assistance for online shopping were also part of Duplex for web.
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Google graveyard
Duplex on the web somehow failed a bit. It has worked well, but the promise made with the announcement is that you could give the Google Assistant a command. She could then book a car for you at a car rental company. Surf to the page, enter your details and even pass on your car preference. A great plan, which unfortunately took a long time to roll out and otherwise remained very locked into the Android ecosystem.
Probably it took too much effort and materials. to continue using Duplex. The ‘agent’ behind Duplex spent hours a day crawling all kinds of sites to train them, the AI in turn had to be refined to understand the setup of websites and that is probably a costly project. Too expensive, it turns out, that Google will now banish it to the famous Google graveyard. Possibly because it is part of the Google Assistant, which has to deal with cuts anyway.
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However, it may also be due to the adoption among companies: some found it uncomfortable that Google would then come between them and their customers.
Image source: Creative Commons photo by Tima Miroshnichenko:
