Google brings turn-by-turn navigation service to more countries
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Google Inc. on Wednesday announced that its Maps Navigation service is now available in 11 more countries in addition to the United States and Britain.
Starting from Wednesday, users in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland can get turn-by-turn voice navigation guidance if they have devices running on 1.6 or higher version of Google's Android operating system, Michael Siliski, a Google product manager, said in a post on the company's blog.
Google Maps Navigation is an Internet-connected GPS navigation system that provides voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps.
Google first launched the Maps Navigation service in October last year and it was initially available in the U.S. and Britain.
The Internet company on Wednesday also opened a mobile voice search service to French, German, Italian and Spanish speakers.
The service, called Google Search by voice, allows users to speak their search queries instead of typing and previously only supports English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.
"Voice has always been the most natural way to interact with a phone -- speaking is typically faster and easier than typing," Amir Mane, another Google product manager, wrote in a blog post.
"Our goal is to bring Google Search by voice to speakers of all languages," Mane said.
