In the latest update, voice navigation tool ‘OK Google’ has been made available on Google Maps. In simple terms it means now users can just ask their smartphone to navigate, re-route or even change the place of destination by just sending in a voice command. This can be extremely useful while driving where earlier one had to spend considerable amount of time in typeing the destination or even change the route.
Not only this, this update brings full Google Now integration in to the Google Maps app. So one can also ask on what road he/she is driving. As of now, in the latest update Speech commands like “what’s my ETA?, find gas stations, navigate to Starbucks and navigate to Home” are available and soon Google is expected to integrate more commands.
The ‘OK Google’ hot-word detection will work once the Google Maps App have been updated if by chance it’s not then one can easily switch it on by going into the Settings menu and enable ‘OK Google’ option.
Google Maps have been recently revamped with a more user friendly user interface and have also added features like ‘areas of interest’ or ‘places where there’s a lot of activities and things to do’ which can be useful in several situations. The areas of interest are usually shaded orange on the maps and the app asks if one wants to stop there.
Last month, we saw a similar ‘OK Google’ hot word recognition implementation in YouTube which was actually there for quite a while now. Google is slowly integrating its famous Google Assistant to most of its apps.