With New App, Google Acts as Tour Guide
Google’s search and map offerings are go-to products for many people, and now the company wants to be your tour guide, too, with a new Android app called Field Trip. In the vein of Google Now, the company’s smart new virtual assistant software that aims to anticipate information you may want, Field Trip pings you every so often with notifications about your surroundings that range from historical data to special deals to cool sight seeing attractions.

You can determine how frequently Field Trip bugs you (or turn off notifications entirely), and give it a better sense of what you’d like to know about by choosing from a list of interests that includes architecture, food, offers and deals, and historic sites. Each interest is seeded with data from a list of Web sources (such as the The Historical Marker Database, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, Google-owned restaurant guide Zagat, and, not surprisingly, Google Offers).
The inclusion of Google Offers is smart. Field Trip could be a good way for Google to sell deals, especially if people use the app whilse on vacation. I know I am more likely to spend money on a new item or experience when I’m on a trip away from home.
Field Trip also lets you see a list of all your recent notifications, or a color-coded map view of all the points of interest nearby. I’m pretty impressed with the app and its twee, retro-travel-guide design so far, and I’ll report back soon with a fuller review.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.