In 2019 , we saw the launch of a web experience by Google for its Duplex service to assist customers with the tedious job of filling out their personal information on websites. By automatically filling out forms on websites, the service aimed to make tasks like ordering a theatre ticket or making a car reservation easier. Later, Google expanded the service to make it easier for customers to reset passwords revealed after a data breach and to streamline checkout procedures on e-commerce sites and flight check-in procedures on airline portals. Google has now, however, officially announced that the service is being discontinued.
The service “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,” according to a new note on Google’s Duplex on the Web support page.
Google does not intend to deprecate other Duplex experiences, though. The business instead intends to shift focus away from Duplex on the Web and into other AI developments for the Duplex voice technology.
In a statement to TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson said, “As we continue to improve the Duplex experience, we’re responding to the feedback we’ve heard from users and developers about how to make it even better. By the end of this year, we’ll turn down Duplex on the Web and fully focus on making AI advancements to the Duplex voice technology that helps people most every day.”
The decision to discontinue Duplex on the Web by Google may have been motivated by the company’s apparent shift away from creating Google Assistant for non-Google devices, however the representative would not provide any other information. The company intends to spend less on developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for automobiles and for gadgets not created by Google, such as TVs, headphones, smart speakers for the house, smart glasses, and smartwatches that run Google’s Wear OS operating system. According to reports, Google will instead focus resources on its first-party hardware units.
