You may be familiar with Gemini as the thing that’s in every Google service you use — whether you want it or not.
While it’s been a constant, sometimes unwelcome presence in Gmail for at least the past year, it’s a relatively new addition to Maps. And you know what? It’s kind of great.
To put it to the test, I had Gemini plan a day-long itinerary for me around the city. After an hour or so of having Gemini find stuff for me — playgrounds near the new light rail extension, kid-friendly restaurants with vehicle themes, you get the gist — I was impressed. Some of the suggestions were obvious, but I also bookmarked a handful of spots not on my radar.
Gemini had big shoes to fill: my own. I’m a Google Maps fiend. I use it for normal stuff like getting around, but also, sometimes I just like scrolling around and seeing if anything new catches my eye. You can find some real gems this way. I’ve found bike routes, playgrounds, hidden parks, and new coffee shops to try. I’d spend all day every day wandering around Seattle on public transit going to bookstores and fancy stationery shops if I could. It’s how I usually spend a day off, but I also tend to get overwhelmed by the endless possibilities and just wind up visiting one of a couple of neighborhoods I know well. So I had Gemini chart me a path into less familiar territory.
Gemini pops up as “Ask Maps” and presents you with a text box when you tap on it. It answers questions based on data in Google Maps, including user reviews, but can pull in information from other sources, too. If you ask whether to bring an umbrella on your trip across town, it can check the weather for you — that kind of thing.
I gave it my parameters: I would be traveling by public transit and I wanted a stop for lunch, a nice walk somewhere, and a coffee shop where I could work on my laptop, in that order. I wanted to visit two different neighborhoods and needed to be home by 4:30. Its first suggestions were very me-coded — a cafe next to a bookstore and a reliable coffee shop downtown — but I’d been to both recently. After a little back-and-forth it was settled: tacos, plants, and a Scandinavian-inspired coffee shop.
Tacos Chukis is familiar to me but I’d never been. I almost walked by the place, since it’s tucked into the back of a building with a half-dozen other retail shops and no sign on the sidewalk. But Gemini steered me to the right spot, and right on time: It had only opened up 15 minutes before I walked in. My AI itinerary hinted that the house specialty with grilled pineapple was a popular choice, and I found out why. Three excellent tacos later, it was time to head to my next stop.
Except I was ahead of schedule, so asked Gemini to find a unique shop nearby I could check out before walking north to the park. It confidently recommended Elliott Bay Books — a great spot, but definitely not “one block east” as it claimed. This was the only major hallucination I encountered in this experiment, but it could have been a real pain if I’d followed its instructions. Did I mention it was pouring rain outside?
After I politely informed Gemini that it was suggesting I walk 10 minutes in the wrong direction, it corrected course and sent me to Kobo: a beautiful little store with Japanese goods. I’d been to their other location a few times but didn’t realize there was one nearby.
By the time I set foot in Volunteer Park, the front of my jacket was soaked. My umbrella was doing the heavy lifting, but I needed it to cover my backpack with laptop inside. Hence, the sog. Gemini had suggested a scenic loop around the park or a trip into the conservatory — basically a giant greenhouse — if I wanted to dry off. No contest.
Plants fucking rule, man. Did you know there’s a tree that hollows itself out to attract ants to live in it? And the ants fight off would-be invaders to protect the tree? That’s wild. That’s also a tree that exists at the Volunteer Park Conservatory, a building I’d seen but never been inside. Admission was $6 and I was a little grumpy with Gemini for failing to mention that, but it proved to be a small price to pay for time inside a warm, tranquil oasis on a rainy day.
Someone who works at the conservatory saw me marveling at one of the towering palms and snapping photos with my phone. She took me over to the cacti room and insisted on taking my photo with the giant cacti there. “It’s so beautiful in here I could cry!” she said as she left me among the cacti. I had to agree. There’s something ghostly about a cactus, and they come in so many different shapes and sizes, down to the classic saguaro that I know mostly from cartoons. There’s the ones covered in fluff, the big round ones that look like the world’s worst footstools, and another one that looks like it’s covered in peeling waxpaper. They’re sort of haunting and mystical up close, like seeing an owl in the wild. Not the kind of scenery I expected on a very wet day in the Pacific Northwest.
I’ve been thinking lately about the way tech companies all seem to want us to use AI to buy more things — even more so after a recent conversation with my friend Will Sattelberg at 9to5Google. The way that every AI demo ends in booking a flight or buying a new pair of sneakers is getting pretty old. But it’s not just a tech company thing — I’ve also been examining my own tendency to seek out a transaction whenever I leave the house.
I gravitate toward places I can leave with a new book, or a coffee, or a little treat, I think partially as a way to alleviate the anxiety of just… existing in the world. How do you pick a place on the map when there are thousands to choose from? What if I choose wrong and have a bad time? Buying a little trinket proves to myself that I went somewhere worthy, my thinking goes. But the feeling never seems to last, so before long I’m back on Google Maps planning another excursion to find the one perfectly curated home goods store that will fix me.
In any case, I did leave the conservatory with some mementos — a soggy admission ticket and a couple of kid-sized gardening tools from the gift shop. My kid loves digging up the yard while I pull weeds, and it’s something I want to lean into more. Sometimes the perfect excursion out of the house can just be playing in the dirt that’s right outside, you know? Anyway, a warm, dry route 10 bus was waiting for me to head toward my final stop of the day: coffee.
How do you pick a place on the map when there are thousands to choose from?
I hadn’t heard of Day Made Kaffe, which struck me as odd, because I’m in the neighborhood where it’s located pretty frequently. Based on Gemini’s description of a minimalist but warm and laptop-friendly coffee shop, it also sounded like my kind of place. I had been there before, I realized when I walked in, before it was a coffee shop. The place used to be a — you guessed it! — fancy home goods store where I bought a couple of Christmas gifts in 2024. Time is a flat circle, etc.
Gemini didn’t miss; Day Made is extremely my shit. The coffee was great and the vibes were immaculate. The cardamom bun that Gemini said I should get wasn’t available, so I got a pastry with guava jelly to compensate for the dismal weather. I watched the Artemis II launch on mute, left the shop at 3:40 as Gemini had instructed, and got on my last bus of the day. The time when I walked in the door at home? 4:26. Nailed it.
If my big day out in the city was a success — and I think it was! — then it was made possible by people, not Gemini. People wrote the reviews and recommendations that led me to Tacos Chukis. Gemini is just the middleman. But when you’re dealing with a vast and often overwhelming dataset like the one in Google Maps, a tool like Gemini strikes me as a very useful one.
I often rely on user reviews to suss out how kid-friendly a place really is, and Gemini lets me search a lot of those reviews across a wide area all at once to find a place that both serves dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and craft cocktails. But crucially, when it’s time to get from point A to point B, the LLM doesn’t just freestyle and talk you through transit directions — you just open up the transit directions in Google Maps, which includes accurate real-time information.
Gemini also does a decent job of showing its work along the way as it makes suggestions so you can see where it’s coming up with claims. It’s not immune from hallucinations, and that’s a particularly big concern when you’re relying on it to steer you through the real world. But knowing that’s the case, I still think this is an impressive tool — whether you’re trying to find a restaurant nearby with high chairs and right now because everyone is hungry and crabby, or whether you’re on a more leisurely adventure of discovery.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
