Waze listens to your voice to report incidents on the road

Google celebrated its navigation applications at the end of the week. After discussing the arrival of Gemini in Maps to find outing ideas in the blink of an eye, we learned that Waze was also preparing to take advantage of the Mountain View firm’s generative AI. However, its use this time is intended to facilitate the reporting of incidents on the road.

Through a blog post published on October 31, 2024, Google explains that it is in the process of developing a conversational reporting feature. By simply touching the report button in Waze, the user will only have to verbally detail the latter so that Gemini categorizes it correctly.

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For example, if you announce: “It looks like there are cars stuck out front!”Google points out that “Waze will understand what you say and quickly add real-time reporting to the map, without the need to use a specific voice command or press additional buttons”.

Please note, questions may be asked of the driver in the event that additional details or information are necessary to identify the current event to be reported.

If you tell Waze that there’s something in front of you, it may ask, “Can you describe what you see?” After sharing more information – like a trash can on the road – Waze can categorize the report, helping other drivers be aware of the danger and avoid it.

In beta, the functionality is not yet deployed on a large scale at the moment. We can indeed read that only the first trusted testers can benefit from it in the language of Shakespeare starting this week on Android and iOS. For deployment, and support for more languages, Waze talks about availability “in the coming months”.

Google is also talking about a new alert to display on the screen when a driver approaches school zones. The opportunity to increase vigilance around schools, where pedestrians are much more present.

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