Hey Google, save the world.
A new life-saving feature will soon be available to iPhone and Android users.
Google is using artificial intelligence to expand its technology that alerts people about life-threatening floods and wildfires.
With new AI technology called transfer learning, Google is able to issue warnings up to a week in advance — in comparison to its previous 48-hour warning, according to the Verge.
Google FloodHub provides flood alerts and allows users to see flood information in their area or area of interest. The information on the interactive map is in high resolution and can show exactly where and when floods are expected as well as how deep the water is predicted to be.
Along with FloodHub, the company is rolling out wildfire tracking in more countries after initially debuting the program in the US.
“Internally for us, it’s a very big change… It’s really a very meaningfully different system,” Stella Nevo, senior staff engineering manager at Google, told the Verge. “From a user’s perspective, they [can] just expect that they have more coverage and it’s more accurate.”
A United Nations report from October found that half the world doesn’t have an adequate early warning system for natural disasters.
In 2021, floods were a majority of the catastrophic events recorded with 223 occurrences — up from an average of 163 per year between 2001 and 2020, according to ReliefWeb. There were a high number of wildfires in 2021, with 19 occurrences compared to the 2001 to 2020 average of 11 per year.
The tech company hopes the expansion will save lives with its warnings by giving people enough time to safely evacuate.
Google sent out flood notifications to 23 million people in flood-prone India and Bangladesh by 2021. Now, the flood alerts will reach 18 more countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Users need to have the Google Search app installed in order to receive these alerts.