Google Maps has added a new feature that allows users to convert their screenshots into travel plans. Google’s AI application, Gemini, has been used in this feature that detects automatically mentioned places on a screenshot and lets users add them to a saved list in Google Maps. The idea here is to help users organize their travel concepts, which typically are collected from social media, news, and travel websites. Users typically screenshot places they want online, but these screenshots could end up lost amidst their camera roll.
With the new feature, users can see their screenshots and tag the places they want to go to. Gemini can identify several places on a single screenshot and provide additional information for each place. These locations are viewable on Google Maps with the ‘camera with flash’ symbol, easy to dream and plan trips.
To use the feature, customers will have to turn it on and permit Google Maps to read their photos. The feature will first be provided for English-speaking iOS users in the U.S. before the feature is developed to support Android devices.
This is all part of Google’s broader effort to enhance travel planning features. Along with the screenshot feature, Google is also introducing hotel price alerts on google.com/hotels. Consumers can input their dates of travel, destinations, and preferred hotels, and Google will alert them if prices decrease substantially.
In addition, Google Search is expanding its scope of AI Overviews to provide trip suggestions for countries and regions, as well as cities. For example, users can ask for an itinerary for nature in Costa Rica. Google Lens is also expanding language support for Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish so that users can point their camera and can speak in these languages.
The Gemini-powered screenshot feature aligns with Google’s vision to make trip planning simpler and more personalized. Employing AI to analyze user-provided data like screenshots, Google aims to make it easier to discover and save places of interest, thereby providing a more enhanced user experience for travelers.
The privacy aspects of the feature are yet to be seen because it’s unclear whether Google examines all screenshots on a device or only those that users deliberately choose to examine. Nevertheless, the feature is opt-in, so users will have control over which screenshots are examined.
Overall, this new feature is a significant step forward in the ability of consumers to utilize Google Maps and plan their journeys more efficiently. By incorporating AI-driven analysis of personal content like screenshots, Google is striving to become the market leader in travel planning to the individual.
