Google India on Tuesday announced new updates and features on Google Maps such as voice navigation in six regional languages and Plus Codes which will make finding addresses and navigating easy for people.
Voice navigation will be available in six additional languages -- Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. The navigation in Hindi was launched three years back.
"Plus Codes" is an open source solution representing a simple and consistent addressing system and works in India as well as globally.
It can be challenging to reach a given residential address in India. Some addresses are well defined by street names and house numbers are easy to find, others can be long-winded and hard to locate. The Plus Codes feature consist of a six-character + city format that can be generated, shared and searched by anyone. To use a Plus Code, users need to simply enter it into the search field on Google or Google Maps, mobile handsets or desktops, which will instantly show a location.
"Millions of people and places in India are hard to locate -- especially those in remote areas. We are deeply committed to helping find solutions to these challenges," Suren Ruhela, director, Google Maps Next Billion Users, said.
Plus Codes can be used for a wide variety of reasons, including communicating the venue of a temporary event, guiding emergency services to afflicted locations and providing an identifiable location for complicated addresses.
The Alphabet Inc-owned search giant also unveiled "add an address" feature that would enable users to submit a missing address and the company would make sure the address is searchable in due course after verification.
The company advised people to avoid including personal details or names while adding an address.
Besides a new 'Smart Address Search' feature has also been added to Maps in India. Google Maps will now try and understand the landmarks in an address and instead of showing no results in some cases, it will display these landmarks when a long address search is typed. This will show the user a location closer to the address, according to Google.
