Google Maps wants to lower the bar for getting started with contributions

Google Maps is as useful as it is because of the quality of information it offers about all the places you might want to visit — and it pulls that off with a lot of help from community contributions. Just yesterday, Google shared some updates on how it was improving that experience, making it easier to share photos with Maps and track your overall impact. But as it turns out, that’s only the start of Google’s upgrades here.

Maps is already taking advantage of Gemini, and that extends into these contributions, with Google sharing how Gemini will now give you a hand thinking up captions for your photo submissions. But we’ve also spotted another place Gemini is looking to integrate itself in the contribution workflow — but this one’s not yet public.

Working with Google’s new 26.15.01.894202351 beta release of Maps for Android, we’ve been able to take an early look at “Tell Maps,” which appears to be AI-powered system for helping with Maps contributions in general. When this is live, you’ll see a “Post and update with AI” prompt for getting started.

Interacting with that should pull up the Tell Maps card, which appears to use a chatbot-like interface that allows you to describe what you’d like to add to Maps. For users who may be unfamiliar with Maps user contributions at all, this could present a nice, low-friction way to get started.

Right now, it’s not quite working as presumably intended — we showed you about as far as we’re able to get in the screens above, but it’s pretty clear that this is still a work in progress. That said, what Google appears to be aiming for here seems reasonably straightforward, so hopefully it won’t be much longer until you’re able to give Tell Maps a spin for yourself.