I let Gemini in Google Maps plan my day, and it worked surprisingly well

You’re probably familiar with Gemini as the thing that’s in every Google service you use — whether you want it to or not.

Although he’s been a constant and sometimes unwelcome presence in Gmail for at least the past year, he’s been… A relatively new addition to the maps. And you know what? It’s great.

To test this out, I asked Gemini to plan a full-day itinerary around the city for me. After an hour or so of Gemini finding things for me — playgrounds near the new light rail extension, kid-friendly restaurants with vehicle themes, you get the gist of it — I was impressed. Some of the suggestions were obvious, but I also bookmarked a few sites that weren’t on my radar.

Gemini had big shoes to fill: mine. I’m a Google Maps addict. I use it for normal things like getting around, but also sometimes I like to scroll and see if there’s anything new that catches my eye. You can find some real gems this way. I’ve found bike routes, playgrounds, hidden parks, and new cafes to try. I spent every day getting around Seattle on public transit and going to bookstores and fancy stationery stores if I could. This is how I usually spend my day off, but I also tend to get caught up in the endless possibilities and end up visiting a neighborhood I know well. So I asked Gemini to chart a path for me into lesser-known territory.

Gemini pops up with the name “Ask Maps” and presents you with a text box when you click on it. It answers questions based on data in Google Maps, including user reviews, but can get information from other sources as well. If she asks if you want to bring an umbrella on your trip across town, she can check the weather for you – that sort of thing.

I gave her my criteria: I would be traveling on public transportation and I wanted to stop for lunch, a walk somewhere, and a café 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. Her first suggestions were very cryptic—a café next to a bookstore and a reliable café downtown—but I’ve been to both recently. After a bit of back and forth it was settled: tacos, plants and a Scandinavian-inspired café.

Choquis tacos are familiar to me but I’ve never been to them before. I almost passed the place, because it’s located at the back of a building that houses six other retail stores and there’s no sign on the sidewalk. But Gemini led me to the right place, at the right time: it opened just 15 minutes before I walked in. My AI itinerary indicated that the house specialty with grilled pineapple was a popular choice, and I found out why. After three excellent tacos, it was time to head to my next stop.

Except I was ahead of schedule, so I asked Jiminy to find a unique store nearby that I could check out before walking north to the park. She confidently recommended the Elliot Bay Library – a great place, but definitely not “one block east” as she claims. This was the only major hallucination I had in this experience, but it would have been really painful if I had followed her instructions. Did I mention it was pouring rain outside?

After politely informing Jiminy that he suggested I walk 10 minutes in the wrong direction, she corrected my route and sent me to Kobo: a lovely little shop with Japanese goods. I’ve been to their other location a few times but didn’t realize there was one nearby.

When I set foot in the volunteer park, the front of my jacket was wet. My umbrella was doing the heavy lifting, but I needed it to cover my bag with my laptop inside. Hence, Suge. Jiminy suggested a scenic walk around the garden or a trip to the conservatory—essentially a giant greenhouse—if I wanted to dry off. No contest.

Plants rule, man. Did you know that there is a tree that hollows itself out to attract ants to live in it? Are ants fighting potential invaders to protect the tree? This is wild. This is also a tree found in the Volunteer Park Conservatory, a building I’ve seen but never been inside. Admission was $6 and I was a little mad at Gemini for not mentioning that, but it proved to be a small price to pay for time inside a warm, quiet oasis on a rainy day.

Someone at the conservatory saw me marveling at one of the towering palm trees and taking pictures with my phone. She took me to the cactus room and insisted on taking my picture with the giant cactus there. “It’s so beautiful here I could cry!” She said as she left me among the cactus. I had to agree. There’s something ghostly about cacti, and they come in many different shapes and sizes, all the way up to the classic saguaro that I know mostly from anime. There are the ones covered in down, the big round ones that look like the world’s worst footstools, and the ones that look like they’re covered in peeling wax paper. It’s kind of creepy and mysterious up close, like seeing an owl in the wild. This was not the kind of landscape I was expecting on a very rainy day in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve been thinking lately about the way tech companies seem to want us to use AI to buy more stuff, and even more after that. Recent conversation With my friend Will Sattelberg at 9to5Google. The way every AI demo ends with you booking a flight or buying a new pair of sneakers is becoming very outdated. But it’s not just the tech company, I’ve also been examining my tendency to look for a deal whenever I leave the house.

I gravitate toward places where I can leave with a new book, a coffee, or a little dessert, and I think in part it’s a way to relieve the anxiety of just… existing in the world. How do you choose a place on a 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’ve gone somewhere worthy, I think. But it seems like this feeling will never last, so I quickly return to Google Maps and plan another trip to find the perfectly curated home goods store that will fix my situation.

Anyway, I left the conservatory with a few souvenirs – a wet admission ticket and a couple of kid-sized gardening tools from the gift shop. My baby He loves Digging up the yard while I weed, this is something I want to lean into more. Sometimes the perfect outdoor trip can be playing in the dirt outside, you know? Anyway, there was a warm, dry bus on Route 10 waiting for me to head towards my last stop of the day: coffee.

I had never heard of Day Made Kaffe, which struck me as odd, since I’m in the neighborhood where it’s located frequently. And based on Jiminy’s description of the simple, warm, laptop-friendly café, it also seemed like my kind of place. I king I’d been there before, I realized when I walked in, before it was a coffee shop. The place was – you guessed it! – A luxury home goods store where I bought some Christmas gifts in 2024. Time is a flat circle, etc.

Gemini didn’t make a mistake; The day it was made To the fullest extent My shit. The coffee was great and the vibes were pure. The cardamom cake that Jiminy said I should have was out of stock, so I got a pastry with guava jelly to make up for the bad weather. I watched the Artemis II launch on mute, left the store at 3:40 as Gemini instructed, and caught my last bus of the day. The time you walked in the door? 4:26. nailed it.

If my big day in the city was a success – and I think it was! – Then it became possible before the peopleNot Gemini. People wrote reviews and recommendations that led me to Tacos Chukis. Gemini is just a mediator. But when you’re dealing with a huge and often confusing data set like that found in Google Maps, a tool like Gemini strikes me as extremely useful.

I often rely on user reviews to find out how child-friendly a place is truly It is, and Gemini allows me to search through a lot of these reviews across a wide area at once to find a place that serves chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs and craft cocktails. But most importantly, when it’s time to get from Point A to Point B, LLM not only guides you with transit directions, it opens up Google Maps transit directions, which include accurate, real-time information.

Gemini also does a good job of showing her working along the way as she makes suggestions so you can see where the prompts are coming from. They’re not immune to hallucinations, and that’s a particularly big concern when you’re relying on them to guide 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 nearby restaurant with high chairs and… now Because everyone is hungry and annoying, or whether you are on a fun adventure of discovery.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge