Even Google Maps Now Has an AI Assistant.
Tech companies really want you to start talking to their products. And sure, that makes sense for the Amazon Echo or even ChatGPT’s voice mode, but I’m not sure I need to talk to my apps . Google disagrees: the company is currently rolling out the “Ask Maps” feature to iOS and Android users in the US and India, making Google Maps the last product to feature an AI assistant. This begs the question: will you talk to your navigation app while driving?
Google offers the “Ask Maps” feature in the following way: instead of searching for generic stops along your route (like “coffee,” “gas station,” or “hotel”), you can ask Maps complex questions to increase your chances of finding something specific. One example of a Google question is, “My phone’s battery is dying—where can I charge it without waiting in a long line for coffee?” This is a complex task, not typically suitable for a navigation app’s search function—you want the app to find a place with public outlets that serves coffee, but that isn’t too crowded at the time you plan to travel. Enter this into a regular search function, and you’ll instantly get a pop-up saying, “No results found in Google Maps.”
Google claims that Ask Maps can analyze information from over 300 million places, including reviews from over 500 million users. Results also take into account your previous searches, as well as any places you’ve saved in Maps. In another example, Google says you might ask your Google Maps voice assistant to find you a place with a “cozy atmosphere” and a table for four at 7:00 PM to meet friends driving from Midtown East. Ideally, the assistant would know not to show places in Midtown East, since your friends are driving from there , and match restaurants with “cozy” reviews that suggest such places. Additionally , it might know from previous searches that you’re vegan, so it would only return results with vegan options.
It’s Google, so of course, the Maps voice assistant is powered by the Gemini platform. It’s essentially an interesting implementation of generative AI. I definitely wouldn’t bother using Ask Maps, but I’d be curious to see if it could actually handle such contextual queries. If I could actually tell Google Maps that I needed to find a restaurant within a 15-minute radius of a concert venue that had available seating for 30 minutes and was accessible to people with gluten and peanut allergies, that would be very helpful.
But AI isn’t perfect. In fact, it has a habit of making things up . It would be frustrating to walk into a restaurant and discover they don’t have gluten-free options, or that everything is fried in peanut oil, or that those items aren’t actually available, or that a concert venue is 15 minutes away but isn’t the venue you’re going to. If such a query overwhelmed the AI and returned results that didn’t match some (or most) of them, or, for example, the message “No results found on Google Maps,” I probably wouldn’t use Ask Maps anymore.