Google Maps gets its biggest navigation redesign in a decade, plus more AI
Google Maps is one of the company's core products, which means it hasn't escaped the shift to Gemini. There will be more opportunities to converse with a robot in Google Maps starting today, but there's also a new navigation experience on the way. The revamped navigation isn't as explicitly focused on the AI revolution, but Google stresses Gemini is still key to making it work.
The latest AI shift in Maps is called Ask Maps, and you can probably guess what it does just from its title. Ask Maps is a Gemini-powered conversational system that can plan trips and answer complex questions about locations across the app's millions of cataloged points of interest.
The new chatbot will be accessible via a button up near the search bar. You can ask it anything you're likely to find in Google Maps without jumping into another app. You can ask for directions, of course, but it can also plan out road trips and vacations from a single prompt. Ask Maps works like a chatbot, so it accepts follow-up prompts to refine and expand on its suggestions.