Home > News

Google Maps Update Adds Assistant and Food Delivery

By Laura Tucker
Google Maps Update Featured

Google seems to have been on quite a tear this year, updating devices and apps. It seems like every week there’s a new update. This week there is an update to Google Maps that adds Google Assistant help, food delivery status, and further COVID-19 data for the given area.

Google Maps Coronavirus Info

It’s clear that this Google Maps update, with its 250 new features and improvements, is all about providing information to users. Amazingly, Google claims more than 500 million updates are made each day to Maps.

The most helpful change to the app is information regarding coronavirus data. Earlier, Google Maps gained the ability, through layers, to add a COVID-19 layer to the map. It’s currently showing the seven-day average of new cases per 100,000 people. It shows the data by country, and in the United States, it’s also by state and county.

Google Maps Update Illinois

However, It will soon show all-time cases and quick links to resources. This will be so helpful for traveling plans, to learn not only whether the place you want to travel to is a current hotspot for the virus, but also if it was a hotspot in the past. If you have questions regarding the info, those resources will be there to help you.

Other Changes in Google Maps Update

There are a few other changes to the Google Maps update that will grab your attention as well. One is that it will show the crowd size on public transit. I checked a nearby train station, but it doesn’t show this information. It either hasn’t rolled out to my phone yet or is because no one is there as it was before 4 a.m. This is in addition to the feature showing the “popular times” that has been on the app for some time.

Google Maps will also begin showing the status of your takeout and delivery orders and your reservations. Users in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Australia, Brazil, and India will see this. This will include information for orders and your pickup times. It will also show your expected food delivery times, anticipated wait times, delivery fees, and reorder shortcuts.

A really great change to the Google Maps update is hands-free driving in the way of Google Assistant. When you’re in driving mode, you can activate Google Assistant to send and receive calls and texts and review new messages across multiple apps. It will even include playback commands for services such as YouTube Music, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc.

Google Maps Update Train

I was not able to access this, as currently, it’s an Android-only option in English in the U.S. It can be accessed through a pop-up, through Assistant settings, or by voice with “Hey Google.”

“Driving mode makes all of this possible without ever leaving the navigation screen, so you can minimize distractions on the road,” wrote Dane Glasgow, Maps VP, in a blog post.

“To make sure that information is as accurate and up-to-date as possible, we rely on 170 billion high-definition Street View images from 87 countries, contributions from hundreds of millions of businesses, and people using Google Maps. … We also invest in technical approaches that power some of our most beloved and essential features — from the 20 million places globally that now show popular times data to AR-powered Live View.”

These changes join all the previous great features. Read on to learn how to get a Google Maps alert when driving in the wrong direction.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.