Google overhauled its Maps app with a broader shift toward Gemini-powered help for everyday travel, the company said Thursday, rolling out new AI tools designed to both suggest what drivers and travelers need and to make directions easier to follow. The redesign aims to make Google Maps more proactive by incorporating two separate features—Ask Maps and Immersive Navigation—into a service used by more than 2 billion people worldwide.
Ask Maps is designed to expand on conversational abilities Google added to Maps last November, giving suggestions for tasks such as finding nearby places to charge a device, spotting cafes with short lines, or building out a detailed itinerary for a road trip with multiple stops and excursions. Google said the Gemini recommendations behind Ask Maps will rely on a database that spans more than 300 million places and on reviews from more than 500 million contributors that have been collected since Google Maps first launched more than 20 years ago.
The other new tool, Immersive Navigation, is aimed at driving directions and is billed by Google as its biggest change to how Maps handles navigation. Google said Immersive Navigation will present a three-dimensional perspective to help users better understand where they are in real time, with Gemini-created 3D renderings that include landmarks such as notable buildings, medians in roads, and other terrain features that drivers can see around them as they drive.
Google said Immersive Navigation is also meant to help Google Maps explain the pros and cons of different driving routes to the same recommendation and to point to the best places to park once a user reaches a destination. The company said the feature will be available in the United States first, on the Google Maps mobile app for iPhones and Android devices, as well as in cars equipped with options to use CarPlay and Android Auto.
In discussing the technology behind the navigation feature, Google said its “AI guardrails” are now strong enough to prevent Gemini from fabricating bogus places to go—a failure mode described within the industry as “hallucination.” Google executives also declined to answer a question about whether the company plans to sell ads to boost businesses’ chances of being displayed in Ask Maps recommendations.
Google tied the Maps changes to its wider push to add Gemini technology across its consumer products, saying it has already introduced more Gemini features into Gmail and the Chrome web browser. The company’s expansion of AI in Maps also comes as Google competes in an AI race that it has framed against up-and-coming rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic, with Ask Maps initially rolling out on mobile in the U.S. and India before expanding to personal computers and other countries.