Alexa, Siri and of course Google Assistant have been with us on a daily basis for a long time now. To search the web, manage connected devices in the home or trigger a functionality on a smartphone or connected speaker. But now, these 2.0 assistants are far from perfect, and the promises made by the major language models give us a glimpse of a new era, where communicating with them will become more fluid, more natural, and even, let’s dream a little, more useful .
More than a year after the arrival of ChatGPT in our bookmarks, we are still waiting for this revolution. While OpenAI and Microsoft have led the way with ChatGPT Voice and Copilot, Google is allowing us to test Gemini in place of Google Assistant, while adding more features to it over time.
Latest: AI interaction with Google Maps. Until now, when we asked it to find a route from our current location, Gemini shared the information it had collected, such as the duration of the trip or the distance to be covered. Now, on top of that, Google’s navigation app is automatically opened, and the ride launches itself.
An increasingly useful assistant
This addition, which may seem trivial, makes Gemini a little more practical, since you previously had to systematically click on a button to open Google Maps after launching a query. In this situation, the interaction between the voice assistant and the user becomes entirely autonomous, and above all particularly effective. These are the kinds of new features that could little by little make this AI-powered tool more attractive than Google Assistant, even if that is far from being the case at the moment.
If you want to test this update, please note that it has been deployed worldwide since March 25, 2024. For the moment, only Google Maps is supported, other navigation applications such as Waze are not yet offered by the assistant.