Google has decided to axe another Google service. The company has quietly announced that it is shutting down Duplex on the Web. The service will not work after the end of 2022.
“Duplex on the Web is deprecated, and will no longer be supported as of December 2022. Any automation features enabled by Duplex on the Web will no longer be supported after this date,” the support page reads.
Google initially announced Duplex on the Web in 2019. It was an expansion of Google’s call-automating Duplex technology that the company showcased in its Google I/O developer conference 2019.
Duplex on the web gave Assistant the ability to navigate websites on its own and perform tasks such as buying tickets. If you had credit card information stored on Chrome, It could purchase online movie tickets on its own if you didn’t have time. Later it also expanded to check into flights, track discounts, and protect users against online data breaches.
If I summarize, It could purchase movie tickets, order food from restaurant websites, check out at different online retailers, check in for airlines website, change your password, and track discounts. Although the feature was available in limited countries, it was working well.
Google doesn’t mention why it decided to shut down the service. But, the decision could be related to return on investment. Google needed to crawl websites multiple times per day and Tain its AI model to understand the website and its function. This was a resource-intensive task and need good investment from Google. Site owners can also easily block Google’s crawler from offering services via Duplex on the web.
With Duplex on the web, Google was trying to save users time in buying something online. But not many companies liked the idea of Google coming in between them and their customers. There were also certain guidelines for publishers if they wanted to enable Duplex on the web for their websites. Not many web publishers signup for this.
