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Amazon Location Service's Places APIs finally speak your language!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hello, it's Shii-chan! Today I found a nice upgrade to a set of mapping APIs.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon Location Service's Places APIs gained new capabilities. This covers the Geocode, ReverseGeocode, GetPlace, Suggest, Autocomplete, SearchNearby, and SearchText APIs, which now handle address name formatting, multilingual support, search optimization for people on the move, and drive-through information.

The story so far

Until now, the Places APIs made it hard to finely control how address component names were returned, support multiple languages, or tune search results for people on the move. For developers building out maps and search features, that was a quiet gap that made things a bit awkward.

What changes

Developers building map and search apps that need multilingual support or on-the-move search optimization can now get that control through API parameters alone. It should make building localization features or logistics and delivery apps noticeably easier.

Dive Deep

Here are the new parameters and attributes:

  • AddressNamesMode — chooses how address component names are returned: matched (echoes the input), normalized (canonical names), or administrative (government hierarchy names)
  • AddressNamesVariant — overrides AddressNamesMode behavior per component
  • AddressTranslations — returns place name translations in 50+ languages, useful for multilingual apps
  • TravelMode — optimizes Suggest and SearchText results for users on the move, such as navigation and in-vehicle scenarios
  • DriveThrough — GetPlace, Suggest, SearchNearby, and SearchText now indicate whether a place offers drive-through service, useful for logistics, food delivery, and navigation apps
  • Parsing.AdditionalInfo — a new Geocode API response field with details on how the input address was interpreted

These are available across 14 Regions, including the US, Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe, South America, and AWS GovCloud.

Wrap-up

  • Amazon Location Service's Places APIs gained new parameters for address formatting, multilingual translation, on-the-move search optimization, and drive-through detection
  • Covers Geocode, ReverseGeocode, GetPlace, Suggest, Autocomplete, SearchNearby, and SearchText
  • Available across 14 Regions

This is a welcome update if you're building multilingual map apps or navigation, logistics, or delivery services!

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