There's a couple things going on that makes it easier to make reservations than to take them. First and foremost I think that generally the questions and responses Duplex will get while making a reservation are much more constrained than the questions a front of house version of Duplex would get while taking them. In making a reservation the restaurant generally will only need to know when and how many so the questions Duplex will be asked are pretty constrained. If a person is calling a restaurant they can have any number of esoteric questions about menu, special dietary accommodations, and special requests all of while will either need to be provided to Duplex or taken over by a human.

I think the difficulty factor plays much more into how they're implementing and rolling out Duplex than any competitor.

The problem this is solving is that there are businesses with no internet presents. If they could get businesses to sign up for something like OpenTable this wouldn't be necessary.