Generative AI updates for Google Maps Platform and Google Earth
Basic explainer
Google Maps and Google Earth are getting new AI features.
These features will help developers and urban planners create more useful and up-to-date products and services.
For example, developers can use AI to generate more accurate and fresh information about places in their apps.
Urban planners can use AI to get faster and deeper insights into their cities, which can help them make better decisions.
Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.
Today, we’re introducing new generative AI capabilities for Google Maps Platform and Google Earth to provide developers and urban planners with fresh, real-world information and to help solve geospatial problems.
Helping developers build generative AI applications with fresh information about places
More than 10 million websites and apps use Google Maps Platform to offer helpful products, from delivery apps to real estate websites. As more developers build generative AI applications, we often hear that they want an easy way to show up-to-date information in their products. Today we’re introducing grounding with Google Maps, a new capability that allows developers to use our rich place data to build generative AI-powered experiences. Grounding with Google Maps helps make answers generated by LLMs more factual and fresh, quickly reflecting updates from the 250 million places in Maps.
Launching soon: AI summaries of places in Rivian vehicles
At Google I/O this year, we announced Gemini capabilities in our Places API, which lets developers show generative AI summaries of places. Next month, Rivian will start using this feature to show summaries of restaurants, shops and supermarkets on their infotainment screens — so drivers can quickly and easily learn more about a place.
Bringing generative AI capabilities to Google Earth
We’re also bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Earth, which will allow urban planners to access deeper, city-level insights and significantly reduce the time spent analyzing data from days to minutes.
Imagine a transportation planner wants to install new electric vehicle (EV) chargers in their city. All they need to do is ask, “Can you map the five zip codes with the fewest EV chargers relative to their geographic area size?” Google Earth uses multi-step reasoning to determine the five zip codes with the fewest EV charging stations, and then generates a helpful custom visualization. You can also take this query a step further and ask if there are hotels and shopping centers that don’t have EV chargers within a certain distance.
We built this capability in partnership with Google Research and X, the moonshot factory. Next month, we’ll start piloting Gemini capabilities in Google Earth — sign up for consideration to be a trusted tester.
We're excited to see what developers and urban planners can do with these latest technologies.
