By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Google Maps is heading in a new direction with artificial intelligence sitting in the passenger’s seat.
Fueled by Google’s Gemini AI technology, the world’s most popular navigation app will become a more conversational companion as part of a redesign announced Wednesday.
The hands-free experience is meant to turn Google Maps into something more like an insightful passenger able to direct a driver to a destination while also providing nearby recommendations on places to eat, shop or sightsee, when asked for the advice.
“No fumbling required — now you can just ask,” Google promised in a blog post about the app makeover.
The AI features are also supposed to enable Google Maps to be more precise by calling out landmarks to denote the place to make a turn instead of relying on distance notifications.
AI chatbots, like Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have sometimes lapsed into periods of making things up — known as “hallucinations” in tech speak — but Google is promising that built-in safeguards will prevent Maps from accidentally sending drivers down the wrong road.
All the information that Gemini is drawing upon will be culled from the roughly 250 million places stored in Google Maps’ database of reviews accumulated during the past 20 years.
Google Maps’ new AI capabilities will be rolling out to both Apple’s iPhone and Android mobile devices.
That will give Google’s Gemini a massive audience to impress — or disappoint — with its AI prowess, given the navigation app is used by more than 2 billion people around the world. Besides making it even more indispensable, Google is hoping the AI features will turn into a showcase that help gives Gemini a competitive edge against ChatGPT.
Prodded by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Google has been steadily rolling out more of its own technology designed to ensure its products continue to evolve with the upheaval being unleashed by AI. The changes have included an overhaul of Google’s ubiquitous search engine that has de-emphasized a listing of relevant web links in its results and increasingly highlighted AI overviews and conversational responses provided through an AI mode.
