If they can get reliably useful AI through voice into maps/navigation, it will be a substantial improvement to the driving experience. It's really frustrating to manage destinations and waypoints while driving. I just checked the process to see if I'm not keeping up and 1. the help docs are out of date. 2. the waypoint search results provides tap points for destinations 10 miles off a route, but shows only 3 pixel red dots for otherwise equally weighted options that are literally on the existing route.
I feel like this in conjunction with highly configurable voice navigation would be great. I'd opt for a scenic route or a dirt road given some time trade off. In addition to that I am so sick of Google maps giving me four instructions each time I merge onto a new freeway (2 mile warning, immediately before, merge onto, continue on). Maybe even an assistant that can tell you the options and let you choose, and that understands when you say shut up about exit 217.
The lane information they're adding to the UI is great, but I hope it's added to the navigator voice, too.
There haven't been many times when I've had to cross three lanes of traffic in a hurry because Google Maps waited until the last minute to tell me to turn right, but they tend to be memorable when they happen.
+1 for Here Maps navigation (especially like the speed limits and speed trap features), but they make keeping a list of locations really painful. You'd think they purposefully trying to make it unusable.
Sounds like google maps, am i right? Almost any other navigation product will do a combination of zooming in and displaying actual road signs with clearly marked intersections etc. Maps is useless without also turning on voice.
Maps is already garbage. It should never pop up extra information during navigation, it's dangerous. I manually pick routes a lot. Sometimes they're not there fastest. While I'm driving, it will constantly tells me it found a faster route, and the only way to stop it from switching is to hit a button.
It would be great if they replaced the Waze search with Google. I really like the waze mapping and interface, but when I use voice to search for a destination, it is nearly useless here in Sydney.
For example, if I search for an exact local place to eat, the top result is some completely irrelevant store on the other side of the city, followed by a list of useless distant results that I have to scroll through to, maybe, find the place I want to go to.
Whereas, the Google voice search finds it first go and starts navigating to it.
Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity. In addition to the "red but no traffic" problems highlighted by others I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes". Additionally:
* I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit.
* There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets.
* Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1]
Edit:
[1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
My issue isn't so much the pain of entry — although it is a pain — as the fact that Google Maps provides better directions, taking into account current traffic conditions, than my car's system.
OTOH, my car's system knows about highway amenities like food & gas, and has a neat feature where it displays a preview of what certain turns look like.
The "obvious" problem is harder than it looks. Even searching in the navigation app gets confused by voice prompts from the same app...so you get things like "find closest gas speed station check ahead". And that's before you get various people involved, never mind any impediments.
All I want is to easily be able to tell Maps “find the next exit with a McDonalds” but this is too complicated a query and so you need a copilot to fight the maps (or use Google maps to find the McDonald’s while leaving the original on your destination on Maps).
The case I find most annoying is driving from one city to another. I don't need directions on how to get to the highway, nor on how to drive straight for 200km[1]. I just want directions when I get close to the city I'm unfamiliar with. Currently, the best solution is turning on directions only when I get a chance to stop near my destination city.
[1] It seems this has gotten better in recent years with less frequent nagging to "proceed straight for 50km" from the app.
I recently saw a post on an android site about alternatives to google maps and since I'm going to be driving over the holidays I have tried out a couple. They may or may not give better directions but the voice nav on both of the ones I tried was terribly robotic compared to google maps' voice.
One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.
That's true, but they seen to cram in roads, at least visually. I would understand it if they optimized the display for navigation, where voice is the primary interface, and the display only is for support. For example, if the voice says "take exit X to Y" Y must be on the map, regardless of its size. And I would think (?of course?), it should not just jump onto the map and disappear a few seconds later.
So, if you plan a route, do the maps change depending on your destination?
That sounds pretty bad if that's the thing you rely on to get you where you're going. Here in NL interchanges are often complex enough that without the navigator picking the right lane you'd end up taking the wrong exit.
I don't use Google maps for driving but I know plenty of people that do and having been in the car with them on occasion has made me even happier with my dedicated navigation system. The voice prompts are super confusing with a lot of irrelevant information (and usually totally mis-pronounced) and now you are supplying even more data points that the actual navigation itself isn't as good as it could be.
I suspect this is a by-product of doing a lot of stuff rather than just doing one thing and doing that well.
This can't be said often enough! Whenever I am driving somewhere new I constantly have to look at the screen to see on the map what the turn after the upcoming one is going to be so that I can chose the right lane. For that very reason my wife and I still tend to have the passenger navigate which comes down to supplementing the Waze directions which information about what lane to likely chose depending on the turn after the next. To me this seems like a obvious short coming and I am surprised it's not a feature one can commonly expect.
> Sounds better than what we have now, which is dumb systems that often repeat stuff unnecessarily and annoyingly: “In a quarter mile, turn right” “In 500 feet, turn right” “Turn right”
Apple maps says things like "at the next traffic light, turn right onto Crankyoldman Street." It's been a while since I used Google Maps.
You can just turn off prompts entirely. Between CarPlay / Android Auto or just having your phone in a cradle relatively high-up on your dash, voice prompts aren't necessary if they're annoying you that much.
Nice idea, but you're missing out on a lot of points.
1) Turn right where? You need the street name.
2) Changing the icon to Go, you're relying on the user to remember what state the dialog was in. Bad idea. When you're driving and have a lot of things going on, you're not going to remember what the dialog directed them to do.
3) Adding distance remaining indicators has always been confusing because it's difficult to translate what distance the navigation app is giving you to real world distance. "Turn. Right. In. Five-Hundred. Meters". SUDDENLY RIGHT TURN, SLAM BRAKES, SCREEEEEECH.
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