Duplex will be shut down on the internet by Google

Soon, another Google service will join the app graveyard of the company. This week, the search engine powerhouse made a stealthy announcement that it would be closing Duplex online. The organization noticed the help won't work after the finish of 2022. “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,” a Google spokesperson told the outlet. “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.”

As an expansion of its Duplex phone reservation AI, Google made its first public announcement of Duplex on the web in 2019. The initial purpose of the feature was to assist Android users in purchasing movie tickets. Assistant was given the ability to independently navigate websites thanks to Duplex on the Web. Assistant could handle all of the laborious tasks associated with purchasing movie tickets on your behalf if you had your credit card information saved on Chrome. The feature was later expanded by Google to safeguard users against online data breaches. You could also use it to track discounts and research flights at one point.

According to TechCrunch, the cost of training an AI to parse websites may be the reason why Google is discontinuing Duplex on the Web. According to the support page for the feature, Google used a unique user agent to crawl websites multiple times per day. Furthermore, if website administrators prevent the crawler from indexing their content, it could have a significant negative impact on Duplex's online performance.