It might be the time of year when you start planning your summer vacation. Google has introduced several new features that can help you with this, including a handy AI feature for Maps.
If you enable the new Screenshots list, Gemini will be able to automatically recognize places that are mentioned in the screenshots you take in the app. You can then save the places you are interested in to the list. These saved places will appear on the map, and you can share the list with your companions. This feature will be available on iOS in English in the US starting this week. It will soon be available on Android as well.
Google has long offered airfare tracking features, and now the company is extending this feature to hotel prices with a special search tool. If you have your sights set on a particular destination for specific dates, you can track hotel prices and get alerts when they drop. Just tap or click the price tracker switch below the search filters. If the price of any of the hotels in your search results drops dramatically, you’ll receive an email alert. This feature will be available worldwide this week.
In the blog post announcing these updates, Google also suggests using AI Reviews in Search to help with travel planning. Starting this week, for English-language queries in the United States, the tool will offer travel planning for specific regions or entire countries. So if you type in something like “create a foodie itinerary for Japan,” AI Overviews will suggest a few ideas that you can export as a list of recommendations to Docs or Gmail. You can also save these suggestions to Google Maps as your own list. I’m not sure I’d trust a tool that doesn’t know how many days there are in a month to come up with travel ideas for me, but hey, it’s a possibility.
By the way, Google is expanding AI-powered reviews in Lens and Circle to Search. Soon they will be available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, i.e. in most countries where AI reviews are available.
