Google is expanding its AI-powered travel planning capabilities with new features that analyze users’ screenshots and generate personalized itineraries. These tools reflect Google’s continued integration of AI across its product ecosystem, with the company focusing on helping users organize travel information while maintaining privacy through on-device processing. The updates arrive just as summer travel planning begins, positioning Google to enhance its role in the increasingly competitive digital travel planning space.
The big picture: Google is launching new AI features in Maps that can analyze screenshots to identify travel destinations, alongside expanded AI Overviews for trip planning.
- The screenshot list feature allows users to feed their travel-related screenshots into Maps, where Gemini will scan them to identify locations mentioned in text.
- Google confirms all Maps image processing happens on device, ensuring screenshots added to Maps never leave the user’s device.
- This feature debuts first on iOS this week, with Android support coming “soon.”
New AI travel tools: Google’s expanded suite of AI travel planning features extends beyond Maps to include itinerary generation and hotel price tracking.
- AI Overviews in search can now generate complete travel plans with locations, photos, itineraries, and more, with easy export options to Docs or Gmail.
- The company is expanding its price alert functionality from flights to hotels, allowing users to receive email notifications when prices drop for specific search results.
- These hotel price alerts are available globally starting this week across all mobile and desktop browsers.
Expanding language support: Google is broadening access to its visual AI tools by adding multiple languages to Google Lens.
- AI Overviews in Google Lens, which launched in English late last year, will soon support Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
- This feature allows travelers to point their phone camera at points of interest and ask questions through the search option.
User experience considerations: Google’s approach to AI implementation prioritizes user choice and privacy.
- The screenshot analysis feature is opt-in, requiring user permission before scanning images.
- AI Overviews won’t automatically expand longer AI responses, giving users control over when to engage with these features.
- The trip planning AI Overviews are currently limited to English for US users only.
Google announces Maps screenshot analysis, AI itineraries to help you plan trips