Duplex on the Web

~ the eulogy ~

Duplex on the Web only ever worked on websites that Google had already written an automation script for, and that list was American cinema chains and American retailers. In Turkey there was nothing for it to point at. The feature shipped on my phone in the sense that Google Assistant shipped on my phone, and it knew how to drive no site in my country.

Google announced it at I/O on 7 May 2019, a year after the Duplex demo that made the news. That earlier demo was the one where a synthesized voice phoned a hair salon and booked an appointment, hesitation noises included. Duplex on the Web was the same idea with the phone call taken out. Instead of ringing a business, the Assistant opened the business's website in a browser and filled in the form itself while you watched the fields populate.

It launched able to buy movie tickets and rent a car. Over the next three years Google widened it to assisted checkout on retail sites and then to airline check-in. The last addition, in 2022, was the one people actually noticed: a button in Chrome that would go to a site where your password had turned up in a breach and change it for you.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it automated ~

The useful way to think about Duplex on the Web is that Google was maintaining a robot per site. Somebody at Google had to know that on this airline's page the check-in button sits here, the confirmation code goes in that field, and the seat map loads after a redirect. When the airline redesigned, the robot broke.

That is why the reach stayed so small for something carrying Google's name. Every new capability meant another entry on a list that somebody had to keep current, and the list grew at the speed of a partnerships team rather than at the speed of a model.

~ the brittle part ~

The password-change feature showed the shape of the problem most clearly. It ran in Chrome, it only knew the sites Google had prepared for in advance, and when your leaked password sat on a site nobody had scripted, the automatic option simply did not appear. You were told you had a problem and then left to fix it by hand, which is where you had started.

~ the deprecation notice ~

The notice went up in the first days of December 2022, in the register Google keeps for this. Duplex on the Web was deprecated, and any automation features it enabled would no longer be supported after that date. Google cited feedback from users and developers, plus a decision to put the effort into the Duplex voice work that it said helped people most every day. No replacement was named.

The voice half it was sacrificed for did not have a long run either. Google kept trimming what the Assistant could do by telephone, and the Assistant itself has a grave on this site now. The idea came back around 2024 under a different word, agents, built this time on models that read a page instead of on a script written in advance for each one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »