Waze just made it easier for drivers to report incidents en route, with a new tool that lets you flag hazards with your voice.
Announced in a blog post by the Google-owned app on Thursday, Waze’s new “Conversational Reporting” feature uses the company’s AI model Gemini to allow you to vocally report things like traffic jams, construction, and random junk finding itself in the road.
All you have to do is tap the app’s reporting button and speak conversationally about the incident, and Gemini will instantly process this into a report. Whether you scream those details in a rage is up to you.
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According to Waze, the app could ask you follow up questions about the report, asking you to provide more details — say, if a mattress is blocking traffic, you might want to specify. You can see how it functions in Waze’s ad campaign video below, in which a cab driver reports construction using one tap and speaking aloud.
The Conversational Reporting feature will be available for “Waze trusted testers” this week worldwide in beta on Android and iOS, and will be rolled out to more users in more languages other than English “in the coming months.”
It wasn’t the only feature announced by Waze this week, with the company also adding the ability for users to mark school zones to the map — a much requested feature. The feature, which will be available globally before the end of the year, also alerts other users to school zones through the app. It’s another of a bunch of features added to Waze this year.
The Waze updates dropped on the same day Google announced a handy new planning feature for Maps, which gives you the ability to ask the app questions that generate AI answers from Gemini. The days of AI-less map platforms are way behind us.
