Google has launched its Google Maps tool in its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Gemini API. The move will give developers the ability to use Google Maps’ data to ground their apps.
“This allows developers to connect Gemini’s reasoning capabilities with data from more than 250 million places, allowing a new class of powerful, geospatial-aware AI products,” James Harrison, group product manager and geo developer, and Alisa Fortin, product manager and Google DeepMind for Google, said in a blog post.
Google shared a video featuring a chat with the Maps demo app. In the video, a user interacts with the maps using natural language voice queries and see quick, conversational results.
Google said the mechanism will be similar to grounding with Google Search, which provides increased accuracy, real-time information and citations.
Likewise, grounding with Google Maps offers real-time data to assist with location-oriented queries. The grounding can provide hours, addresses and ratings. It can be used for personalized, local recommendations and “place-based answers” from review and Google Maps data.
Grounding with Google Maps and Google Search can also be used together in the same requests.
“For example, when asked about ‘live music on Beale Street,’ combining tools allows the model to use Maps data for a venue’s operating hours and Search data to find the specific start times for evening shows,” the blog post reads. “Internal evaluations show that using both tools together results in a significant improvement in response quality compared to using either alone.”
Travel stakeholders weigh in
Travel industry stakeholders reacted to the news on LinkedIn, sharing thoughts with travel and AI in mind.
“I’ve always thought that for trip planning apps to have any chance of success, they’d have to be natively integrated with Google maps, which is ostensibly the world’s most important travel app,” Marc Mekki, founder of consulting firm Inspire Limitless, wrote on LinkedIn.
“Gemini’s native integration, which really only Google can ever do (talk about a moat…) is a step in that direction and one the travel industry should pay attention to, more than the lightweight ChatGPT plugins of Booking.com et al. Google may quietly be building the AI operating system for travel discovery and planning.”
Mekki tagged other travel industry members in his post, with a few providing responses in the comments.
According to Christian Watts, CEO of Magpie, Google Maps is “so dominant in-destination” that it doesn’t feel like a app.
“It’s just the thing you communicate with dozens of times a day,” Watts wrote. “If I was OpenAI I’d be making a map.”
Peter Syme, partner for the Tourpreneur Travel Community, said he has an open mind when it comes to winners and losers in AI ventures, but he would have to be an “idiot” to bet against Google.
“I think the difference this time is context,” Syme write, adding that Google Maps already knows its users’ intents, preferences, movements and timing patterns.
“Gemini doesn’t need to ask what kind of traveler you are, it can infer it,” he said. “Then if you are also on Gmail, they have all that actual booked data of every booking of every type of travel product/experience.”
Syme surmised that if billions of “where should I go next” queries live in Google’s ecosystem then the meaning of a moat goes “to a new level.”
“It’s the foundation of an AI first operating system for travel,” Syme said.
Major AI players making travel-related strides
Google’s latest move follows several recent AI releases in the travel space. OpenAI launched apps within ChatGPT at its developer conference earlier this month. Expedia and Booking.com were among first partners. And Expedia Group partnered with Perplexity on the release of Comet, its downloadable AI assistant and browser.
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