Google Maps is looking to put artificial intelligence in your passenger seat when you drive.
Using Google’s Gemini AI technology, the world’s most popular navigation app will be getting more conversational as part of a redesign announced on November 5.
The change is meant to turn Google Maps into something more like an insightful passenger, able to direct a driver to a destination while also offering ideas on places to eat, shop or sightsee.
“No fumbling required — now you can just ask,” Google promised in a blog post about the change.
The AI will also let Google Maps name landmarks to look out for when making a turn, instead of just giving a distance at which to turn.
AI chatbots like Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been known to sometimes make things up, or “hallucinate.” But Google is promising that it will build in safeguards that will stop Maps from sending drivers down the wrong road by mistake.
All the information that Gemini uses will come from the roughly 250 million places stored in Google Maps’ database of reviews collected during the past 20 years.
Google Maps’ new AI will be coming to both Android phones and Apple’s iPhones.
That will give Google’s Gemini a big audience to impress — or disappoint — with its AI, since the Maps app is used by more than 2 billion people around the world.
Google is also hoping that adding its AI to Maps will help bring attention to Gemini, and give it an advantage against ChatGPT.
Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, Google has been adding more and more AI to its own products. Even Google’s popular search engine has been focusing less on listing web links, and more on AI overviews and conversational responses.
