What's better than making a map? Making a machine that makes maps.

Imagine that someone builds a new house, and a street view car cruises by. That may end up being searchable in our maps without a human ever being in the inner loop, or having to do anything with that, adds Looking bill. That process-of Al analyzing imagery and updating the map-is what he calls "the first step towards our maps becoming self-healing.

Creating building outlines is one task, he says, where better Al has greatly sped things up. A Machine learning algorithm can look at satellite imagery and then draw the shape of the building on the Google Map. Thanks to that, we were able to double the number of buildings we've got modeled worldwide, Looking bill says. That happened over the course of a year. For a sense of Scale, he adds, all of the previous buildings we'd had, had taken us a decade to map. Google touches on this in a blog item it published today, which describes the way a previous algorithm created building outlines as looking fuzzy the post also explains the general steps and data sources that go into their map making.

Other work, still in its nascent stages, involves using Al to create new roads on the map from imagery it analyzes. That road synthesis, Looking bill says, involves them actually trying to figure out the geometry of roads that we don't have already on the map, based on imagery.

For the artificial intelligence algorithms to do things like create building outlines or map new roads, its using imagery like top down stellite data; for extacting information like street names, house numbers, and business names, the company is relying on street view...

Of Course, Google Maps is not the only game in town: we noted in June that Apply is creating maps with greater details in its own app, and that you should see changes in the experience when you update to iOS 13 this fall.

And on a larger note, machine learning algorithms that train on data to  then accomplish taks, sometimes at a superhuman level, are common in the tech world. That can involve something mundane, such as Yelp using Al to analyze and organize that pizza and taco pics that its users upload. and does;t just do thins like recognize what's in mages: it can also do a myriad of other things, like playing and winning games, whether it's poker. or even a Rubiks cube.,