{"id":93350,"date":"2025-10-20T21:02:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T21:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/93350\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T21:02:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T21:02:08","slug":"google-launches-google-maps-in-gemini-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/93350\/","title":{"rendered":"Google launches Google Maps in Gemini API"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google<\/a> has launched its Google Maps tool in its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Gemini API.\u00a0The move will give developers the ability to use Google Maps\u2019 data to ground their apps.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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,\u201d James Harrison, group product manager and geo developer, and Alisa Fortin, product manager and Google DeepMind for Google, said in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Google said the mechanism will be similar to grounding with Google Search<\/a>, which provides increased accuracy, real-time information and citations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201cplace-based answers\u201d from review and Google Maps data.<\/p>\n

Grounding with Google Maps and Google Search can also be used together in the same requests.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, when asked about \u2018live music on Beale Street,\u2019 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,\u201d the blog post reads. \u201cInternal evaluations show that using both tools together results in a significant improvement in response quality compared to using either alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Travel stakeholders weigh in\u00a0<\/p>\n

Travel industry stakeholders reacted to the news on LinkedIn, sharing thoughts with travel and AI in mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’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,\u201d Marc Mekki, founder of consulting firm Inspire Limitless<\/a>, wrote on LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cGemini’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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mekki tagged other travel industry members in his post, with a few providing responses in the comments.<\/p>\n

According to Christian Watts, CEO of Magpie<\/a>, Google Maps is \u201cso dominant in-destination\u201d that it doesn\u2019t feel like a app.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just the thing you communicate with dozens of times a day,\u201d Watts wrote. \u201cIf I was OpenAI I’d be making a map.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Syme, partner for the Tourpreneur Travel Community<\/a>, said he has an open mind when it comes to winners and losers in AI ventures, but he would have to be an \u201cidiot\u201d to bet against Google.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the difference this time is context,\u201d Syme write, adding that Google Maps already knows its users\u2019 intents, preferences, movements and timing patterns.<\/p>\n

\u201cGemini doesn\u2019t need to ask what kind of traveler you are, it can infer it,\u201d he said. \u201cThen if you are also on Gmail, they have all that actual booked data of every booking of every type of travel product\/experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Syme surmised that if billions of \u201cwhere should I go next\u201d queries live in Google\u2019s ecosystem then the meaning of a moat goes \u201cto a new level.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the foundation of an AI first operating system for travel,\u201d Syme said.<\/p>\n

Major AI players making travel-related strides<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s latest move follows several recent AI releases in the travel space.\u00a0OpenAI launched apps within ChatGPT<\/a> at its developer conference earlier this month. Expedia and Booking.com were among first partners. And Expedia Group partnered with Perplexity<\/a> on the release of Comet, its downloadable AI assistant and browser.<\/p>\n

Want more on Google? Join us at The Phocuswright Conference<\/p>\n

Join us at The Phocuswright Conference in San Diego, California, November 18-20 to hear James Byers, group product manager for search at Google, give a presentation and executive interviews on travel search in the AI era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google has launched its Google Maps tool in its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Gemini API.\u00a0The move will give developers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[218,14666,1223,1711,9668,61,60,3045,43,9676,7330,80,43605,19378,43603],"class_list":["post-93350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-distribution","tag-generative-ai","tag-google","tag-home-2nd-tier","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-machine-learning","tag-news","tag-online-travel-agency","tag-search","tag-technology","tag-travel-booking","tag-travel-inspiration","tag-travel-planning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}