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Google Maps Can Now Order Your Dinner and Track Your Train Delays

MacRumors said:


Google today added new agentic capabilities to the Gemini-powered "Ask Maps" assistant in the Google Maps app.

google-ask-maps.jpg

Ask Maps can complete multi-step tasks, such as ordering a meal for you on your way home. Google says you can simply say something like "order spicy pad kee mao with seafood for me to pick up on my way home," and Maps will find open restaurants along your route, let you pick one, and add the dish you asked for to your cart so you can review it and check out.

Food ordering is rolling out today with partners like Square and Toast, with Uber Eats integration coming soon.

Ask Maps can also look up information about hotels and events when you're traveling, comparing prices in real time and checking availability for a hotel, then offering up ideas on things to do nearby.

Google says its live updates are coming to transit. A transit widget in Ask Maps offers up-to-the-minute information about delays for bus, train, subway, and ferry rides.

A new Personal Intelligence option in Ask Maps allows the feature to connect to Gmail to factor in upcoming plans without needing specific instruction. Connecting to Gmail is opt-in and off by default. Ask Maps can also remember prior conversations for context if history settings are turned on.

There's a conversational edits option for suggesting new details for the Ask Maps feature. You can tell Maps about an insider tip and Ask Maps will offer the information to others in the community.

Ask Maps is also expanding to Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, and Mexico, along with over 150 countries and territories in English.

The live transit widget, personalized responses, and conversation memory are rolling out everywhere Ask Maps is available. Food ordering, discovering hotels and events, and conversational contributions are rolling out in the U.S., with more countries set to be added later.

Ask Maps is available on the web and in the Google Maps app for iOS.

Article Link: Google Maps Can Now Order Your Dinner and Track Your Train Delays
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Still doesnt have 3d satelite navigation on iPhones🫠
 
I just want a map to be a map, sure it is nice to be able to type in show me how to get from here to here, but I really don't want my map doing much else.
This will be a U.S. thing, if it comes to the U.k, it will take ages. Not that I would ever use Deliveroo or any other those services.
 
Fair enough. If people don't want this feature then just don't use it. One thing that I find a bit frustrating about all this AI stuff though is the introduction of these sort of I assume relatively complicated (as in difficult to implement properly) functionality while skipping over what at least for me would be more useful non-AI features that I assume would be easier to implement.

Relating to Google Maps one example is Uber. OK, there was probably some corporate falling out or just an inability to agree terms behind this feature going away (at least in the UK, maybe it is still a thing in the USA?) rather than anything technical but I really miss the days when Google Maps integrated directly with Uber so when getting directions the choices were not only walking, cycling, public transport and driving but also ride hailing where it automatically looked up the price of the journey on Uber for you as well. It was sufficiently long ago that I can't remember whether you could then book the ride from within Maps but just getting an idea of the price without having to open the Uber app was something that I found really useful.

Another example not related to mapping but again illustrative of my frustration at a fancy feature getting introduced when what I would value a simpler feature more is the upcoming (currently in beta) smart tab grouping feature in OS 27 Safari. I admit that I haven't tried the beta so the smart grouping feature just might work really well for me but what I know I would find useful (because I recently moved from Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge and miss it a lot) is a good vertical tabs implementation in Safari that I assume would have been less complex to implement than the AI grouping feature.

Please Google, Apple and others - while I am not an AI hater and find some of the stuff out there really useful - please don't get 100% focussed on introducing more and more fancy AI features at the expense of improving the basics (non-AI stuff).
 
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boswald said:
Yes, I know, "Google is evil" and blah, blah. But that's really cool.
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...and you'll keep thinking its cool for five minutes until you get bored with it and go back to just bookmarking your favourite take-aways and hitting "order again". Assuming Google doesn't remove the bookmark feature to drive people to AI.

MacRumors said:
Google says you can simply say something like "order spicy pad kee mao with seafood for me to pick up on my way home,"
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If I know what I want with that specificity I'll also know where I want to get it and have the restaurant bookmarked or on speed dial. Especially if I'm "on my way home".

Otherwise, I'll want to see the menu and check out the restaurant home pages & reviews so "find Thai takeouts near to me" - which we've had for a decade or so - already did the job. Better still, look up from the phone and ask a human friend/colleague where the best local takeaway is vs. which one serves the best cryptosporidium.

Typical case of "<new tech> is the solution - now what was the problem?" from someone who has <new tech> to sell. Rinse and repeat for every "cool" new tech that comes along.


svish said:
Good to know about this. Getting more information about train and bus delays could be useful.
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My ticketing app(s) already does that - straight from the horse's mouth rather than via AI hallucinations.

JulianL said:
Fair enough. If people don't want this feature then just don't use it.
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Reasonable point, except "don't use it" now means "hunt around for the obscure option to turn it off and go back to the old search box - if it still exists - after every software update re-enables it".

Plus the restaurants having to deal with all the butt-dialled food orders & customers complaining about getting the wrong order (because they trusted the AI too much) or losing business because - for some unknowable reason - the AI never selects them.

I don't usa AI. I still get my time wasted when other apparently lucid people confidently give me information which later turns out to be error-ridden AI slop.

Just for the record - LLMs etc. are going to be an important part of computing and have already improved things like speech/text recognition and searching... but the current trend seems to be using them for the things that they are bad at and where hallucinations could cause problems. If AI can give me better web search results by being more "context-aware" - when regular keyword searches are becoming near useless thanks to SEO and the overall scale of the web - then great. But give me the actual search results - don't try and hallucinate a summary (or offer summaries to muppets who will then pass them on with false confidence).
 
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I've seen so much tech that can't deliver on its promise. I'm going to need to see amazing consistent results before I believe these agents can actually do what we want.
 
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Luftkopf said:
It’s such a tech-bro solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If I'm getting take away on the way home, I know what I want and where I want it from. I don't want Google or anyone else sticking their nose in to be a useless middleman!
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Google Maps already had a “search along route” feature, so this is just a refinement of that to cut out some manual steps. The article said that if one has places saved that match the criteria, they will be included. This will be useful for travelers or those who don’t know where to get product XYZ in their area.

You can continue ordering takeout how you do now if you don’t want to use it.
 
I do not order meal delivery... call for pickup on very rare occasions (most often a hand tossed/topped pie + a greek salad from a local pizza joint).

I cook 99% of the time and go to restaurants to interact with other human life forms here and there as well 😀
 
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this is literally solving a problem no one ever had you just go to another app or you swipe somewhere else it’s like one more tap. Maybe I don’t see anybody using this feature.
 
mudflap said:
Remember when Duck Duck Go was caught in bed with Microsoft?
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I must have missed that, but since you posted about it, I had a look around and it seems like it is sorted now.

What specific data does DuckDuckGo share with Microsof...

Executive summary DuckDuckGo’s contracts with Microsoft historically permitted Microsoft-owned tracking scripts (notably Bing and LinkedIn domains) to ru...
factually.co factually.co
spreadprivacy.com

Web Tracking Protection: DuckDuckGo's Privacy Promise

Over the next week, we will expand the third-party tracking scripts we block from loading on websites to include scripts from Microsoft.
spreadprivacy.com spreadprivacy.com

Still trust them more than others, nothing 100%
 
underthere said:
I make my dinner at home 🙂
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So do I.
I do like a chippy now and again.
For you people on the other side of the pond, Chips shop in U.K, sell chips, so like Fries, but better. If we buy Chips some of us call it having a chippy,
I like chips and a burger in batter, but I have not had any for months.

Anyway, apart from that I cook at home.
 
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