One thing in your comment surprised me: "when a thing opens and closes"
Why you would rely on the model's weights to know opening hours, instead of having the model call a web search tool to verify it on the official site?
One thing in your comment surprised me: "when a thing opens and closes"
Why you would rely on the model's weights to know opening hours, instead of having the model call a web search tool to verify it on the official site?
I believe Gemini Flash is smart enough to know when to ground with web search. Their app has been saying it’s running a web search on almost all of my queries since 3.6. And given that Google … is Google, I trust them with web search grounding more than anyone else.
It can also ground with Google Maps data in addition to web search.
I wasn't trying to be precise originally, I just tried to fit activities into "morning / evening" buckets. I did the whole itinerary with Opus first, but when I gave it to Gemini 3.7 Flash to review, it started correcting it with "this place will close 5PM" or "this place is closed for good".
It was right on every nit, so it was surprising how well the model knows these things. If I ever release this I'll probably need the SERP API or Google Maps SDK (which I've heard is very expensive now), but for a personal trip where I will verify manually, using the LLM is okay for now.
When you called the Gemini API, did you opt in to using search grounding:
I'm curious whether in fact you were getting answers from the model weights (which is what I had assumed) or whether your API calls were resulting in web search tool calls.Google AI person here:
Using grounding in Gemini is indeed backed by the same canonical data source for business information (like opening hours) as Google Maps. This stuff is available in its own API for a GCP fee, but we’ve built tooling to connect it to the Gemini agentic ecosystem as well.
Gemini models - at least via some interfaces - have tool calling API access to various Google integrations. flights.google.com, maps.google.com, etc.
The info isn't in the model weights.
Because of where I live, there are three viable airports for any given flight I might want to take, which historically has made shopping a real pain. But Gemini (and only Gemini) has greatly simplified it. Pramble plus date range plus destination and it very quickly generates potential itineraries with costs, total travel time (driving included), etc.
Maybe the model does some tool calling on its own to figure out the times?
You can opt in on a per-request basis.