How Google used AI to supercharge Maps in 2019

Google Maps celebrated its 15th birthday today by announcing a new milestone: in the last year, the company mapped as many buildings as it did in the previous decade. The service reached this landmark through a two-step process. Firstly, staff worked with Google's data operations team to manually trace common building outlines. They then trained machine learning models to recognize the edges and shapes of buildings. Another recent deployment of machine learning enabled Maps to recognize handwritten building numbers that were so unclear that even a passerby in a car couldn't see them.