Waymo is putting Google’s Gemini AI assistant inside its robotaxis for the first time, alongside the first major redesign of its rider interface in years.
Both features are launching in the Ojai, Waymo’s purpose-built vehicle, as the company gets ready to open the car up to more public riders.
Gemini in Waymo
The headline feature is Gemini in Waymo, a conversational assistant riders can call up by pressing a Gemini icon on the screen. Waymo describes it as a way to handle cabin controls, journey information, “Waymo education,” and general questions during a ride.
The examples Waymo gives are the obvious ones. Tell it “turn the A/C to 65” and it adjusts the climate. Ask “where is the best coffee shop nearby?” or “what’s the history of that monument?” and it answers. It runs on Gemini’s live assistant, so it’s a full voice conversation, not a fixed command list.
Gemini in Waymo runs completely separately from the Waymo Driver, the AI that actually drives the car. You can ask it by voice to pull over, but Waymo says Gemini “does not otherwise control any aspect of the vehicle’s movement or routing and does not have access to real-time driving data.” The company’s own framing: think of it as a helpful passenger in the next seat, there to chat while the Driver watches the road.
The assistant stays inactive until you engage it, and Waymo is pitching that as a privacy feature. It’s launching in beta.
If this sounds familiar, it should. App teardowns surfaced Waymo testing a Gemini assistant late last year, complete with a leaked system prompt. Now it’s a shipping product.
A redesigned cabin screen
The second change is a full redesign of the in-car screen interface, which Waymo says is its first major update in years. The pitch is a more relaxed, “lean-back” ride, with dynamic elements that surface trip information and music controls and a system menu for cabin and media settings.
The interesting piece is what Waymo calls a “choreographed” tri-screen experience. The Ojai carries three screens, and instead of mirroring the same view on all of them, each screen shows different information based on which seats are occupied. A solo rider in the right rear seat gets full controls on their screen, while the other two might show a simplified trip status or an ambient media player.
That setup also enables Calm Mode, which dims the screen down to minimal trip info for riders who’d rather not look at anything at all.
Waymo is now competing on the ride, not just the map
None of this touches the driving, which is where Waymo leads. Waymo already runs more than 3,000 vehicles and roughly 500,000 paid rides a week across 11-plus cities, and it went driverless in Las Vegas this month with more cities on deck. Coverage is becoming table stakes. The next battleground is what the ride actually feels like.
The Ojai is built for exactly that. Waymo designed the vehicle around ride-hailing from the ground up when it started offering rides in the Ojai in May, and the Gemini assistant and choreographed screens are the software layer on top of that hardware.
The contrast with Tesla is hard to miss. Tesla is still running a handful of Model Ys in a geofenced patch of Austin, months into a “Robotaxi” service that still isn’t close to its promises. Waymo is far enough along that it’s spending engineering time on the cabin experience.
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