Google for India 2024: Google announces new AI-powered features for Google Maps, Search

Google hosted its Google for India 2024 event today wherein it announced a host of new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features coming to Google Maps. The company today announced Google Maps will soon show users summaries about new dining places in a city. This feature is powered by Google's generative AI-based model, Gemini, which the company says analyses billions of reviews on Maps.

Google also announced a new feature coming to Google Maps that will allow users to search for specific items and experiences. "Whether seeking themed birthday cakes or unique picnic spots, AI-powered image recognition analyzes billions of images shared by the Google Maps community to deliver relevant, photo-first results and a map for visual exploration," Google wrote in a blog post.

Lastly, the company announced that it is rolling out two new weather-related alerts in India, which includes support for low-visibility areas due to fog and flooded roads. "So, if you find yourself driving into a foggy area - or if a downpour has impacted your upcoming route, you can both see and report these alerts to keep your community informed," the company added.

AI-powered Google Search

Google is also upgrading its AI Overviews feature that is available in Google Search. For the unversed, Google first announced AI Overviews at Google I/O back in May this year. At the time the AI Overviews feature was available only in English. Later, the company updated the feature to add support for Hindi. Today at the Google for India 2024 event, the company announced that it will roll out support for Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi in AI Overviews in the coming weeks. With this, users will be able to see a brief summary of the information that they have searched for in the supported Indian languages.

Lastly, the company announced support for video-based queries in Google Lens. Google said that soon users will be able to 'use Lens to search with a video and ask more complex questions about things in motion'.

As far as availability is concerned, Google said that it will soon be rolling out this feature with support for queries in India to Search Labs users.