Google Maps announces new features and somehow none of them are 'pause navigation' | TechCrunch
Look, we’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and you pull off the highway for some food or fuel. And then Google Maps starts (rudely) yelling at you to get back on the road. The company has all the money and AI chips in the world and yet the app can’t just chill when you need to make a pit stop.
So when Google announced Wednesday that it’s adding two new features to Maps, a tiny part of my brain held out hope that this would be the day it would resolve this conflict.
Alas, neither of the features Google announced is the ability to pause navigation mid-trip. The company is making it easier to report things like construction, lane closures and police presence. It’s also going to more obviously highlight the destination and even the building entrance and nearby parking lots, which should help with unfamiliar places. Great!
Of course, in a situation like the one I described above, one could exit the navigation and start it back up after acquiring said food or fuel. In fact, this the exact solution I got from Google’s own “AI Overview” as I was searching for examples of other people begging the company to add a pause function to the Maps app. One could also add the pit stop as a “waypoint” to the trip to stop the app from insistently re-routing — as is suggested in the top result from Google’s own support community. But that adds even more work and mental load for a person who’s already driving a car.
Google, when asked by TechCrunch, pointed out that navigation will automatically pause if you have already added the stop as a “waypoint” to the trip. But if you make a stop on a whim, the company similarly suggests ending the trip and resuming it once you’re done with the detour.
I know I’m not alone here, as people have spent years asking Google for this feature. And to be fair, Apple Maps does not have this feature either. Neither does the other top option, Waze, which Google also owns.
This is Silicon Valley, the land of incinerating money in service of eliminating friction. The tech industry has helped convenience seep into every other facet of modern life, so why is this particular example of its absence allowed to persist?
Updated with information from Google on other ways to handle mid-trip stops.
Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open-source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg said…
Axle Energy is a B2B, back-end infrastructure business focused on connecting flexible assets, such as electric vehicles and home batteries, to energy markets that aren’t otherwise available for consumers to…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on…
WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Li said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage,…
While venture capitalists and the rest of the technorati are off on holiday or attending the Paris Olympics, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its staff attorneys are keeping…
The serious, long-term negative impact of the bankruptcy of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) fintech Synapse will be significant “on all of fintech, especially consumer-facing services,” one observer has said. In the wake…
Google has released a trio of new, “open” generative AI models that it’s calling “safer,” “smaller” and “more transparent” than most — a bold claim, to be sure. They’re additions…
Look, we’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and you pull off the highway for some food or fuel. And then Google Maps starts (rudely) yelling at you…
AI lobbying at the U.S. federal level is intensifying in the midst of a continued generative AI boom and an election year that could influence future AI regulation. New data…
Bungie, the gaming company that created sci-fi hits such as Halo, Destiny, and Marathon, has laid off 220 employees, roughly a 17% reduction to its workforce, the company announced Wednesday.…
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need…
Featured Article
A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code…
If you are on the developer beta, you can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language is set to U.S. English and region is set to U.S.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Gartner released a report suggesting that around a third of generative AI projects in the enterprise will be…
More than 100 VCs, including Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban have pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Mobilizing under the…
Match Group announced Tuesday that it has discontinued livestreaming services in its dating apps, resulting in a 6% reduction in workforce. The news was delivered during the dating app giant’s second-quarter…
This week’s video shows 4NE-1 doing a lot; in some sense, it’s doing more than we’ve seen from other humanoids in the space.
Bending Spoons said that it will continue reserving 30% of WeTransfer’s advertising space to give back campaigns and editorial content.
AI agents are all the rage right now, and Tezi, an early-stage startup, is working on one to help HR teams find the perfect candidates for a job opening. The…
Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales reps, has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft.
Date Like Goblins is geared toward the gaming community and allows users to connect through voice chat while playing video games.
Farms produce a lot of data. From machines to irrigation systems, farms generate a lot of information that could be helpful to both them and the companies that serve them.…
The startup has raised $21.5 million to build more of its machines and deploy them throughout the U.S.
You can even upload a screenshot of a ticket, or a list of cities you are visiting and ask Mindtrip’s assistant to suggest places to visit, bars and restaurants.
Checkly helps devs get signals about an app’s performance and downtime, offering a set of subscription-based synthetic monitoring tools.
Lightrun also on Wednesday disclosed an $18 million SAFE round it raised last year, bringing Lightrun’s total funding to date to $45 million.
Badoo, Bumble, Grindr, happn, Hinge and Hily all had the same flaw that could have helped a malicious user identify the near-exact location of another user.
