Google Maps AI to Help You Pick Restaurants

Google Maps is getting a significant upgrade that will use AI to help you discover new locations to visit. Immersive View will allow you to explore additional places starting this week, and you can use detailed queries, such as “things to do with friends at night,” to find specific locales.

The start-up is using Google Maps’ billions of human-written evaluations and its Gemini AI to provide summaries, offer suggestions, and respond to queries within the mapping tool.

After that, Google will create “inspirational collections” that fit that criteria using its Gemini AI model. Google Maps may provide sites classified as “speakeasies” or venues with “live music” for late-night possibilities. Regular search results, meanwhile, continue to appear beneath these groupings.

However, Google is incorporating more AI capabilities into Maps than just that. When you tap on a destination, you’ll get a prompt to “Ask Maps about this place” and AI-generated summaries of user ratings. You can ask a question here, and Maps will utilize Gemini to provide an AI response based on the information it has collected from reviews. Utilizing the mapping service’s current user evaluations, it may also be utilized to use generative AI to provide interactive Q&As, summaries, and recommendations.

The tool, called “inspiration curated,” makes use of Google Gemini, which already summarizes Google search requests. Gemini will extract information from the billions of user ratings that have been posted on Maps regarding eateries, tourism attractions, and other locations.

Miriam Daniel, the head of Google Maps, gave an example of how this would operate at a press event. She chose a restaurant and asked, “Is it a quiet atmosphere?” Then, according to Google Maps’ response, the place “has a lively atmosphere and a cozy feel.” The reviews that Gemini utilized to develop its response are included beneath the response. These capabilities, which expand on the AI integration Google started experimenting with earlier this year, are being released for iOS and Android in the US this week.

Daniel also went to say, “We wanted to ensure that everything we present from this experience is new and accurate.” “We are able to ground the results from Gemini and pull from the 100 million updates that occur every day, ensuring that the results display actual locations on the map.”

Additionally, Google plans to provide Immersive View to 150 cities. This function, which was initially introduced in 2022, allows users to explore a city at street level and provides an aerial perspective of a spot by combining Street perspective and satellite imagery. Other enhancements include improvements to its Waze-like destination assistance tools, which were previewed in July, and improved navigation that will display more information on the map while traveling in specific cities. Speaking of Waze, the Google-owned software is also introducing the capability to voice-report roadside occurrences.

Furthermore, Google is depending on gathering any sensitive data in order to prevent tailoring the recommendations to individual users. Rather, the AI-powered functionality is made to take advantage of the query’s “context.” For instance, Google Maps will utilize the phrase “live atmosphere” and the user’s search time to generate the relevant recommendation if the user searches for “iconic bars with a lively atmosphere.”

Google Maps will include built-in prompts designed to highlight the AI-generated suggestions in order to encourage people to test the function. This week, US users may anticipate the arrival of Gemini-powered functionality, beginning with the Google Maps apps for iOS and Android.

Similar features, such as AI-powered review summaries and the ability to pose in-depth questions about locations, will also be available on Search in the upcoming months, the firm stated.