As part of Google Maps’ continuous effort to become more than just a navigation app, they’re introducing a new feature that will be helpful for those who like trying out new restaurants. They are now making it easy for you to “dish-cover” which dishes are most popular and which have pictures and reviews submitted by other users. This feature is powered by a machine learning algorithm with relevant photos and reviews so you can see everything in the restaurant’s “page” on Google Maps.
If you’re planning to go to a new restaurant but you don’t know what to order (and you’re not that adventurous to try something sight unseen), you will now be able to check out what people on Google Maps are saying about that place. Pull up the restaurant on the Map and in the overview tab, you’ll see the popular dishes that are available in the place. The menu tab will let you scroll through the meals that people post about on Maps, including reviews and photos.
If you’re in a foreign country and you don’t read or speak the local language, Maps will automatically translate the reviews for you. Hopefully they can also do this for the menu, but maybe you can use Google Lens for that since they now have the overlay translate feature so you can just point your camera at the menu and it should be able to translate it.
Google Maps is able to bring this feature not just through machine learning but also because people are generous enough to contribute their photos and what they think about the food and specific dishes. Hopefully this will also encourage you to also take pictures of your meals and dishes and share it on the app. Also, don’t forget to add the names so Google can learn and add them to the “database”.
You can now find the popular dishes in the overview section when you look for the restaurant on Google Maps, along with the directions, photos, reviews, and ratings that you previously could see.
