Google is shutting down a rather obscure project: Google Duplex on the Web. “Duplex”is Google’s branding for AI that performs “simple yet familiar tasks that save you time.”The branding exists in two products: this “web feature”and Google’s human voice AI, the latter of which, as far as we know, still works. This version of Duplex—Duplex on the web—was a Google Assistant feature that could autonomously navigate websites on your behalf and perform activities such as shopping for items and checking in for a flight. This feature couldn’t have been very popular, and TechCrunch noticed a support page update saying that Duplex on the web would be dead by the end of the month.
Duplex on the Web launched in late 2019 and was announced earlier that year at Google I/O. The normal checkout process for an item involves a lot of navigation and saved data insertion. You’ll have to find the item and possibly the time slot you want if it’s a booking, enter your billing information, and hit “Next”a lot, and Duplex on the web had to do it all offline. While it would probably be faster and more reliable if companies just created a voice API, Duplex on the web was a hack. The assistant would open their own web browser and individually click through the checkout screens while you watched. Google’s automated mouse clicker would theoretically scale well,
Now, however, he is dead. Google’s support page states that “Duplex on the web has been deprecated and will no longer be supported from the end of this month. Any automation features enabled by Duplex on the web will no longer be supported after this date.”Google told TechCrunch, “By the end of this year, we will move away from Duplex on the web and focus entirely on improving the AI of Duplex’s voice technology, which helps people the most every day.”
We’ll make a wild guess and say that the reason Duplex on the Internet is dying is due to underutilization. One of the (many) problems with voice assistants is that they are basically command line interfaces. There is no user interface or buttons that tell people what features are available, so users just need to know what commands to say. Most people can probably guess “what’s the weather like tomorrow?”is a valuable command, but probably very few people knew that Assistant can autonomously navigate a website to buy a movie ticket or check in for a flight on your behalf. At least the command line interfaces have a “help”command that shows a large list of commands.
Apart from the perennial discoverability problem, it’s not clear that this feature ever really solved the problem. It’s not that hard to buy something online or check in for a flight because companies are already trying to make these things as easy as possible.