MapmyIndia Is Now Map; Also Launches Hey Map Keyboard With Mapping Function

MapmyIndia has long been associated with its GPS devices that you put in your cars, but it also has apps for smartphones, and at a press conference in Delhi on Monday, the company announced a new keyboard with access to its digital map data, called Hey Map. It has also announced a revamping of its main app, now known simply as Map.

The Map app benefits from a number of partnerships that MapmyIndia has made, including with ISRO for satellite images, and with Bengaluru-based Reverie to offer a fully localised map experience in Indian languages, starting with Hindi. The app will soon allow for multilingual search as well, it added in a mailed statement.

The Hey Map keyboard comes with a built in local assistant that lets you type in multiple Indian languages, and pulls up the relevant local information based on what you typed. You can also explore nearby places through the keyboard - useful if you're messaging someone and want to quickly find a convenient location to meet, for example.

Typing in a word like Basket (in English, or doing the same in Hindi to get बास्केट, or similarly in other Indian languages) will show you results for locations such as Godrej Nature's Basket, and Big Basket. You can get the results on a list, or on the map view. And by simply pressing the 'flip' button on the keyboard, you're back to typing as usual. This also works with speech-to-text.

With the new app, you can also create and search for MapmyIndia's eLocs - short codes for physical addresses. It has other features such as real time location sharing, tracking your journey, and giving you traffic information as well.

"Our new Hey Map keyboard assistant, and new flagship Map app, will allow all billion Indians to benefit from our map of the future by allowing powerful map, navigation, tracking, and analytics features to be accessed across all interfaces, such as mobile, keyboard, voice, VR, across all apps, websites, phones, and IoT platforms and the data and APIs that underlie our map will be power a whole host of consumer, automotive, business and government solutions," said Rohan Verma, Chief Technology Officer, MapmyIndia.

As mentioned above, MapmyIndia has partnered with ISRO's satellite mapping portal Bhuvan, and it has also been integrated with the soon-to-launch Navic, India's indigenous satellite navigation system. This enables tracking and geofencing features in the new Map app, apart from features such as searching for brands, reporting issues for other users to see, and information and reviews on locations in the maps.