Google announces new travel planning features in Gemini

A day after OpenAI unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, Google announced major changes to its search engine, among a number of other AI-driven product updates. That includes new trip planning features, which travel officials say could already show improvements in this area.

Gemini Advanced is Google’s premium AI chatbot service. Already attracted the attention of travel thought leaders. In a product update Tuesday at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, Gemini Advanced uses spatial data and inference to prioritize and drive decisions when building personal itineraries. We were shown how to do it.

“We’ll show you how Gemini plans and takes action on your behalf, bringing us one step closer to becoming a true AI assistant,” said Sissy Xiao, vice president and Gemini general manager at Google. said. “We all know chatbots can give us ideas, but planning a great trip requires a lot more. You need the intelligence to make informed decisions.”

That’s “a big deal,” Focuswright says. Mike Colletta, Senior Manager of Research and Innovation“So far, many of these [trip planning] The tool has a hard time understanding dates, time frames, and distances. ”

Hosted by Coretta last month Webinar on why travel planning startups usually struggle, which elaborates on business model issues. Even for companies that can find ways to maintain user loyalty, the bigger challenge is how to compete with what Google can do, especially with the benefits of connectivity through features like Google Flights and Google Hotels. The webinar revealed that this is possible.

Colletta said travel planners may have been snooping around that Tuesday.

“Given that Gemini has access to Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs, and more, it seems like a very useful and capable tool for planning trips,” he said.

Xiao took to the stage at a conference in Mountain View, California to demonstrate the updates that will be rolled out this summer. She asked Ms. Gemini to plan a trip to Miami, taking into account her son’s love of art, her husband’s love of seafood, and the flight and hotel details already in her Gmail inbox. I encouraged them to plan a family trip.

“To understand these variables, Gemini starts by collecting all kinds of information from search and useful extensions like Maps and Gmail,” Xiao says. “I use that data to create a dynamic draft of possible travel options, taking all of my priorities and constraints into account.”

The trip was two and a half days long – that was clear from Xiao’s flight information. Recommended seafood restaurants were close to the hotel and activities were organized partially based on travel time. For example, the first day’s activities were limited because the plane arrived late in the afternoon. Additional prompts allow you to instantly eliminate choices based on dietary restrictions or other preferences.

When Xiao adjusted the family’s wake-up time on Sunday, Gemini moved the walking tour to the next day and added a lunch option near a recommended museum to make the most of the day.

“It would have taken hours of checking multiple sources and figuring out the schedule, but as a Gemini, I was able to do this in a fraction of the time,” Xiao said.

Also announced at Google I/O was Project Astra, a multimodal AI agent that uses your phone’s video camera and voice recognition to observe the world and have real-time conversations. The feature is the ability to mirror GPT-4o, the previous day’s OpenAI.

“The fact that these similar features debuted one day apart shows how close the competition is between AI platforms, and that no one platform has a particularly sustainable advantage.” Coletta said. “Google’s advantage in travel planning is that it’s natively integrated with other travel products, but these new multimodal models are universally accessible and allow people to explore destinations interactively, including foreign language translations. This could have a significant impact on how we explore in the very near future.”

See you Tuesday, Expedia Group launches new AI-powered travel planning tool Romieaimed at assisting travelers with their search, shopping, booking, and support needs while traveling.

This article was first published focus wire.