Google Maps gets streetwise in India with AI, expands across 3,000 cities

Mapping platform gets over 50 million searches daily; introduces new features including address-based descriptor

A year after the panoramic Street View was launched in India, Google Maps now allows users to view and explore over 3,000 cities and towns in the country. Last year, Google had announced its tie-ups with Tech Mahindra and Genesys International, which gave access to images of buildings and streets to Google, which then deployed artificial intelligence (AI).

It allowed the company to extract details of over 300 million buildings and overlay them on maps. This ability to give precise information allows better search on Google Maps, according to Miriam Karthika Daniel, vice-president, maps experience, Google.

“Since we have been able to do more mapping in India and use the power of AI to innovate on top of that information, we have made good progress here. For instance, we are able to drive 50 million searches on Google Maps every day. A lot of these searches are voice, which is unique to India, across 10 different languages,” she said in an interview with Business Standard.

Daniel added that the use of Street View and AI to give more accurate results is very important in India, owing to the country’s uniqueness in terms of the way addresses are shared, the modes of transport and constant road repairs and changes to routes.

Google Maps on Tuesday announced a list of new features, including a landmark-based address descriptor, in India.

The California-headquartered tech giant announced the addition of features customised for Indian users at an event in New Delhi. The landmark-based feature, expected to go live in early 2024, will allow users to see the closest five landmarks to an address pin put on the maps.

“We are putting on the map something that is unique to India, which is how people actually talk to each other when they give directions,” said Daniel, explaining the rationale behind the landmark-based feature.

The company also introduced the Live View walking feature in India. It will provide users with overlays, including arrows and markers, in real time when they point their camera towards the roads while navigating. This will be done using AI, Street View and augmented reality.

Like many other tech product companies, Google Maps too is creating India-first versions and then rolling them out elsewhere.

The address descriptor is one such example. “We launched this capability earlier this year for developers in India on the Google Maps platform to help them benefit from more intuitive address solutions. We’re now expanding this to developers in more than 75 cities in India,” said Daniel.

The team working on the address descriptor is based out of the company’s Bengaluru office.

Other products designed in and for India before going global include the Offline maps, which is meant to get around connectivity issues in far-flung areas. Similarly, the company created a two-wheeler mode in India to help riders identify the fastest routes, and then scaled up the feature in other countries.

Further, following on from its announcement of a tie-up with the government-owned Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) during the Google for India 2023 event earlier this year, Maps said it is partnering with the Namma Yatri app to bring Kochi Metro to its platform from January 2024.

“By mid-2024, in collaboration with Namma Yatri and ONDC, we are going to light up Kochi Metro on Google Maps all the way to booking your journeys,” explained Miriam.

Besides, the mobility application, Where is My Train, will start providing information about local trains, starting with Mumbai and Kolkata in the initial phase.

Google Maps also announced that its global AI-based fuel efficient routing system will go live in over 20 Indian cities from January 2024, adding that it would help in reducing carbon emissions.

“We launched this worldwide about a year and a half ago, and since we launched, 2.4 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions have been calculated as savings at the planetary levels,” said Daniel.

Mapping India

Business and places located on Google Maps	30 mn+
Active users who are contributing to edits	60 mn
Searches by users per day	50 mn
Direction generated for users every day by Google Maps	2.5 bn km
Direct merchant to consumer connections	900 mn
Source: Google Maps