Another Google service will soon join the company . The search giant quietly announced this week that it is shutting down Duplex on the Web. in one discovered by , the company notes that the service will stop working after the end of 2022. “As we continue to improve the Duplex experience, we’re responding to the feedback we’ve received from users and developers about how we can make it even better,” a Google spokesperson said for the outlet. “By the end of this year, we will retire from Duplex on the Web and fully focus on making AI advancements on the Duplex voice technology that helps people the most every day.”
Google first announced Duplex on the Web as an extension of its . Originally, the feature was developed to help Android users to buy movie tickets. Duplex on the Web gave the assistant the ability to navigate websites themselves. Assuming you’ve saved your credit card information in Chrome, the assistant can do all the busy work of buying movie tickets for you. Later, Google expanded the feature to protect users from online privacy breaches. At one point, you could also use it to check in flights and track discounts.
As for why Google is turning off duplex on the web, TechCrunch suggests that this might have something to do with the cost of training an AI to analyze websites. The feature’s support page notes that Google used a special user agent to crawl websites as many times a day as possible. Additionally, Duplex on the Web’s performance could suffer significantly if website administrators prevented the crawler from indexing their content.
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