Google recently announced that it will be shutting down Duplex on the Web, its project that provided AI automations to its customers.
Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its suite of AI-powered services that included food ordering and movie ticket purchasing. According to a note on a Google support page, the automation features enabled by it will no longer be supported starting this month.
A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that Duplex on the Web will be shutting down by the end of this year. “As we continue to improve the Duplex experience , we’re responding to feedback we’ve heard from users and developers about how to make it even better,” they said in an email . “By the end of this year, we’ll be shutting down Duplex on the Web and focusing entirely on making AI advancements in Duplex voice technology that help people more every day.”
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Google introduced Duplex on the Web , an offshoot of its Duplex technology for call automation, during the Google I/O 2019 developer conference . At first, it was only useful for a few specific things, like opening a movie theater chain’s website and automatically filling in the necessary information for the user. It paused to ask questions about things like seat selection. Later, Duplex on the Web was equipped to automatically change passwords that had been compromised in data breaches. It could also help with online shopping checkouts for retail sites, flight check-ins for airline sites, and finding discounts for users.
With Duplex on the Web , you can tell Google Assistant things like “Book me a car from Hertz .” It will then open the relevant website and fill in your personal information, such as your name, car preferences, travel dates, and payment method (which it collects from Gmail and Chrome ’s autofill feature ). While the rollout was gradual at first, it has since expanded to include more locations and partners that can use it for specific tasks. Android was still the only platform from which Duplex on the Web could be used — however, in late 2019, “Assistant in Chrome” also became available on Chrome for Android devices.
Did Google have a hard time keeping up with demand for Duplex on the Web ? Probably. As the app’s support page previously mentioned, Duplex used a special user agent that was “trained” by crawling websites several times a day. This process allowed the AI models to understand how those websites were structured and operated from a user’s perspective—but it was very time-consuming and could be disrupted if website owners chose to block their content from being indexed.
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A recent report in The Information detailed Google to invest less in developing Google Assistant for non- Google devices, which was likely the last straw for some brands. These service outages come after growing tension between Google and these same brands, who were already feeling uneasy about what they saw as Google between them and their customers.
Google ’s decision to shut down Duplex on the Web highlights some of the limitations of AI technology when it comes to customer service applications. While this type of technology has the potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with customers, companies should also consider its limitations before investing heavily in such solutions. While this may be sad news for those who used Google Duplex on the Web , we hope that this will provide lessons for future technologies that want to fill similar roles in customer service applications.
Source: techcrunch.com
