If you’re still using Waze as your favorite GPS app, you’ll be seeing the loss of a certain function. Waze is ending its support for Google Assistant in the iOS version of the app.
A representative for the company took to the Waze public forum yesterday to announce that it will be phasing out Google Assistant after trying to fix the feature for a year. They said the iOS version of Waze has been suffering numerous issues with Google’s AI voice chat feature that it had tried to address for “over a year” to no avail, and as result it won’t be able to patch it.
“As many of you have likely experienced, this feature has not been working as intended for over a year, and we sincerely apologize for the prolonged inconvenience,” the rep wrote. “Rather than simply patching a feature that has faced ongoing difficulties, we’ve decided to phase out Google Assistant on iOS starting tomorrow and replace it with an enhanced voice interaction solution in the near future. As always, we are committed to keeping you informed and will share more details as we progress.”
The rep pointed out that Google Assistant will still work on the Android version of Waze. They said “it has consistently performed reliably” on that platform, so not all hope is lost in that regard.
The nature of the issues Google Assistant suffered on Waze on iOS are unknown, but the company’s plans to nix the feature coincide with Google’s push for Gemini. It already comes preinstalled in Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones, but now the chatbot app is being made available for iPhone users as well. Gemini may be what Waze was referring to when it mentioned an “enhanced voice interaction solution,” but we don’t know for sure if it will integrate that into the iOS app.
In the meantime, iPhone users can use Siri to open Waze and ask for directions to a given destination. It won’t do anything special beyond that.
