IMAIA: Interactive Maps AI Assistant for Travel Planning and Geo-Spatial Intelligence

Most mapping tools remain point-and-click, making it hard to ask spatial questions or relate what a camera sees to its surrounding geography in a view-aware way. We present IMAIA — the Interactive Maps AI Assistant — which enables natural-language interaction with both vector (street) maps and satellite imagery, while enriching camera inputs with geospatial intelligence to help users interpret the world around them.IMAIA consists of two complementary modules:* Maps Plus, which treats the map as primary context by converting tiled vector or satellite views into a grid-aligned format that language models can query to resolve deictic references (e.g., “the flower-shaped building next to the park in the top-right”).* Places AI Smart Assistant (PAISA), which performs camera-aware place reasoning by fusing image–place embeddings with geospatial signals such as location, heading, and distance to ground the scene, highlight key attributes, and produce concise explanations.A lightweight multi-agent design ensures low latency and transparent intermediate reasoning. Across map-centric question answering and camera-to-place grounding tasks, IMAIA consistently improves accuracy and responsiveness over strong baselines while remaining efficient for real-world use. By uniting language, maps, and geospatial cues, IMAIA advances from scripted interactions to conversational mapping that is both spatially grounded and widely accessible.