Waze announced a range of updates to the popular navigation app Monday.
Two letters absolutely dominate today’s technological landscape, and that’s as true for navigation app Waze as it is for anything else. Now, AI is helping motorcyclists out with personalized navigation and hazard identification like potholes, speed bumps and raised crosswalks to hopefully make their rides faster and safer.
Waze says it’s rolling out motorcycle mode to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Malysia, Mexico, Peru and the Philippines first, with other countries getting the functionality later on.
Zooming out to all of Waze’s user base, riders and drivers alike, the Google subsidiary announced that the app will now suggest routes based on previous trips. Personalized navigation will, for example, use side streets instead of main highways if you avoid highway trips during heavy traffic hours, rather than just going for what it thinks is the absolute most efficient route each time. You can turn personalized navigation if you want, with Waze saying, “It’s easy to choose alternate routes or turn off personalization altogether in your settings”.
A new conversational reporting feature also lets drivers tell Waze of impending problems on the road, without having to fiddle around with their phones. If you also get annoyed with the app piping up way too much to alert you, there’s also a “Less Chatty” mode that will shut up the less critical prompts. Basically, it’s a step above “Alerts only” to actually feed you navigation instructions too, but it won’t bombard you nearly as much as having it in Normal mode, so you can still listen to music and podcasts largely uninterrupted. Unlike the motorcycle mode, these features are rolling out globally across Android and iOS.
Swinging back around to AI — this being Google, of course — you can now use Gemini to help find something more broadly than a specific destination. Examples it gives include finding the nearest gas station with the lowest prices, finding a coffee shop that’s open at that particular time, all using conversational-style cues. For now, it’s just rolling out to the beta community, though that feature will likely be available throughout the full user base before too long.
