Google Shuts Down Duplex on the Web, Its Attempt To Bring AI Smarts To Retail Sites and More

Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its AI-powered set of services that navigated sites to simplify the process of ordering food, purchasing movie tickets and more. From a report: According to a note on a Google support page, Google on the Web and any automation features enabled by it will no longer be supported as of this month. Google introduced Duplex on the Web, an outgrowth of its call-automating Duplex technology, during its 2019 Google I/O developer conference. To start, it was focused on a couple of narrow use cases, including opening a movie theater chain's website to fill out all of the necessary information on a user's behalf -- pausing to prompt for choices like seats. But Duplex on the Web later expanded to passwords, helping users automatically change passwords exposed in a data breach, as well as assisted checkout for ecommerce retailers, flight check-in for airline sites and automatic discount finding. The promise of Duplex on the Web was that you'd be able to issue Google Assistant a command like "Book me a car from Hertz" and have Duplex pull up the relevant web page and automatically fill in details like your name, car preferences, trip dates, payment information (using information from Gmail and Chrome autofill), and more.

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