My wife and I love a good date night or long road trips. But as our schedules have gotten busier with work, it has become difficult to take the time out to look for new places to visit.
Add in a new baby, and things get even more challenging.
A new Gemini-powered feature in Google Maps changes everything, though, taking out the hassle of searching for a place to eat or a hidden gem to visit.
Planning date nights used to take way too much effort
In my 20s, my wife and I had a lot of time to plan our weekly date nights. We’d select multiple restaurants and bars, and then zero in on the best one for the night. Similarly, for our road trips, I’d spend hours researching the hidden gems to visit.
This process would typically involve spending a lot of time on Google Search to shortlist a few places. Then I checked the places in Google Maps to see if the reviews looked good and the place was worth visiting.
All that worked back in the day. But as our lives have gotten busier, time has become a luxury we could rarely afford. The addition of a new baby to our family has only made our schedules busier.
While date nights and road trips are compulsory for our sanity, taking out the time to plan them has become a chore.
I can no longer spend hours on Google Search to find the best places for date nights or road trips. With a baby, this task has become even more difficult, as I need to ensure the place we are visiting is baby-friendly.
Planning road trips became an even bigger challenge. My wife and I could no longer just pick a spot and head there during the weekend. With the baby, I need to plan every rest stop and avoid long travel stretches between our destinations.
More importantly, I had to ensure that the final destination was worth visiting. You can’t pick a place that’s too hot, too crowded, or lacks basic amenities when traveling with a baby.
None of this was impossible. It just required more time and research than I could spare. I no longer had the luxury of time to spend hours on Google Search and Google Maps, planning every detail of our road trips and date nights.
Gemini-powered Google Maps to the rescue
Google has been integrating Gemini into nearly every corner of its ecosystem. Ask Maps brings the power of Gemini within Google Maps.
You can ask questions about any place on Google Maps and receive relevant, personalized answers. It does this by using data from Q&As on Google Business Profiles, posts, reviews, and publicly available information.
In simple terms, I could now “Ask Maps” what I wanted, and it would use the power of Gemini to help me. So, for our last two date nights, I let Ask Maps do the heavy lifting.
I described the vibe of the place we were looking for, our cuisine preferences, and, most importantly, whether the place was baby-friendly.
Ask Maps understood the context, scanned the information available on Google Maps, and provided us with a list of places to visit. This way, my wife and I could directly skip to doing our favorite part: picking the place we wanted to visit.
If we do not like the suggestions, we provided Ask Maps with more context to help it provide better recommendations.
The best part is that I can ask follow-up questions based on the recommendations, like what the reviews say about the food or a quick check on the parking situation. This goes beyond the traditional search experience that we are all used to.
Even when navigating another city using Google Maps, we rely on Ask Maps to find the best places for a late-night dinner that are also baby-friendly. Previously, this meant spending 20 to 30 minutes juggling through multiple apps to check reviews and find places worth visiting.
Now, Gemini-powered Ask Maps does all the hard work. We only spend time picking the place to visit from the suggested list.
Similarly, Ask Maps has made road trip planning a breeze. Now, I tap the Ask Maps button in Google Maps and tell it what I’m planning: “I’m looking for a road trip for this coming weekend.”
Then, I can get as granular with my requirements as possible, such as the destination not being more than 6 to 8 hours away and highlighting good baby-friendly rest stops.
A few seconds later, Ask Maps provides me with a detailed list of places we can go for a road trip, with recommended stop locations in between.
Stop searching, start ‘Ask’-ing
Ask Maps changes the way I plan my date nights and road trips. If anything, it fundamentally changes how I now use Google Maps.
Instead of manually searching for places and jumping from one app to another, I tap the Ask Maps button in Google Maps, provide all the details on what I’m looking for, and let Gemini do the rest.
Ask Maps is one of those Google Maps features that you should not ignore.
