Google is shutting down its Duplex Web service, probably too expensive to train AI to navigate sites.
Soon, another Google service will join the American giant’s app graveyard. Mountain View announced this week that they are phasing out Duplex on the Internet. On a help page spotted by TechCrunch, the company announces that the service will no longer be operational after the end of 2022.
Google is shutting down its Duplex web service
“As we continue to improve the Duplex experience, we’re responding to the feedback we get from users and developers so we can do even better,”a Google spokesperson told US Blog. “By the end of the year, we will be shutting down Duplex on the web to fully focus on delivering AI improvements to Duplex voice technology that helps people every day.”
Google announced Duplex on the Web in 2019 as a direct extension of its Duplex artificial intelligence for phone number reservations. The feature was originally conceived and intended to help Android users buy movie tickets. Duplex on the web gave Assistant the ability to browse websites on its own. If you filled out your banking information in Chrome, the Assistant could take care of the entire movie ticket buying process for you. Later, Google expanded its functionality to protect users from data leaks. At one time, with its help, it was even possible to obtain information about airline flights and track promotional offers.
It’s probably too expensive to train AI to navigate websites.
As to why Google decided to stop using Duplex on the web, TechCrunch suggests it could have a lot to do with the cost of training AI to navigate websites. The feature’s help page states that Google used a custom user agent to navigate sites several times a day. Additionally, Duplex’s performance on the web can be severely impacted if the administrators of the sites in question prevent the tool from indexing their content.