Guest post: #AskHERE on Twitter and you shall receive

Throughout its existence Twitter has been a source of quick gratification – offering bite-size chunks of information on any topic, as quickly as you can type in a search query. Now, with a local pilot in collaboration with Twitter Australia, we’re turning our @HERE Twitter account into a smart route planner that can offer directions to your destination or suggest a nearby restaurant, ATM, petrol station, or other point of interest.

This Australian-first service allows users to ask @HERE on Twitter for a route or location, and receive a quick reply to most basic navigational questions. The answers, which are enriched with a link to start navigation and an image of the route overview, are a great demonstration of creating interactive, responsive services on Twitter.

To take advantage of our new offering, start your tweet with @HERE, ask for ETA to destination or restaurants near me and add #AskHERE at the end of your Tweet. Please make sure to have share precise location on!

Just as you would ask friends for recommendations, @HERE will give you a suggestion with detailed directions to a nearby restaurant based on your geo-tagged tweet. Turn-by-turn directions are one tap away!

An automated system built by Australian software company @proxima_io connects tweets by their geo-tagged location to HERE APIs to ask for a route or a place suggestion.

Iris, Proxima’s natural language processing engine, reads the tweet to understand what you are asking. It then queries the HERE Routing API or Places API in a way that’s similar to how HERE WeGo delivers navigation services.

We’re excited to reveal to people on Twitter the millions of points of interest available through HERE mapping APIs.

Sebastian Pedavoli@proxima_ioCo-founder of Proxima

 Tweet at @HERE to try it out for yourself. Because this is a pilot, we’re relying on your feedback to refine and extend this feature, so please let us know what you think on Twitter.