Truckstop, flush with new investment from ICONIQ, has embraced its Silicon Valley marriage by teasing an “Iron Man”-inspired, Jarvis-like assistant for its load-matching product. The company told FreightWaves that the video is a suggestion of whats to come, not something that is in the market today.
Jarvis, the affable but omniscient assistant of Tony Stark in the “Iron Man” movies, has arrived in the trucking industry courtesy of Truckstop.com and its new Silicon Valley-fueled product development cycle.
The voice assistant integrated into Truckstop’s load-matching product uses Alexa voice-recognition technology, feeding commands into a deep learning system that allows the carrier to search for specific load parameters and selection criteria. This spares users the need to type into a computer or phone.
Truckstop posted a video showcasing the technology to its website Monday morning. You can watch it here.
Voice search, which is becoming more common for everyday activities, looks to be a good fit for load matching, especially as load boards migrate from Craigslist to NASDAQ-like marketplaces.
Truckstop recently rolled out a pilot test of it’s instant booking offering known as Buy It Now, which will allow the carrier to consummate the transaction completely inside the Truckstop marketplace. Schneider Logistics was the first 3PL to pilot the offering and a few others are also involved in the testing.
It seems Truckstop’s investment partner, ICONIQ, a family office funded by Zuckerberg, Sandburg and Dorsey money, is committed to modernizing and innovating Truckstop from the ground up. By rebuilding product infrastructure and releasing new features the industry desperately needs, Truckstop is challenging its own Innovator’s Dilemma.
In years past, it seemed that the load board space was content to allow for small but incremental pivots to product offerings, while enjoying enviable margins and growth. With load boards and all companies involved in the load-matching space under attack from upstarts, Truckstop appears poised to help define the future versus being defined by it.
TLX
I’ll watch how this goes for now and I wish them luck. As a privacy advocate, I don’t care for any company collecting “voice prints”, then possibly getting bought out in 5 years and all of the sudden your computer is telling you about a load, to call your Mom and pay the electric bill. The whole thing goes in the direction of creepy for me. Maybe it’s just me getting old or people getting more lazy.
Dave
Truckstop is smart. While this video shows the future in a very glossy “perfect world” sort of way, they are def heading in the right direction. Yes yes we all know this video is at least 10 or 15 years away (no trucker i’ve ever met looks or talks like that and i can’t even get Alexa to turn some of my lights on properly most of the time lol) it does show how machines and humans will interact one day. Hopefully it won’t be like the Terminator movies.
So much useful tech has come out in the last few years that help us to do more with less. Today i use Ascend TMS as our TMS, the Trucker Tools app for our drivers, Smart Capacity for our brokerage, Quickbooks online for our accounting, Truckstop and CH Robinson for backhauls in Ascend, Keeptruckin ELDs, and Comdata mobile to get cash to the drivers as they need it. It all works together in our TMS software and costs us less that a full tank of gas in one of our trucks each month.
i guess you have to paint a vision and head in that direction. For Truckstop this means that they know that load boards are going away in their traditional sense one day and they are reinventing themselves which is pretty brave in my opinion. I guess they learned from the mistakes made by Kodak. 🙂
Nice video to! lol.
TLX
Sounds like you have lots of great software and apps. Just curious…what would be your plan if you were located in the Sonoma Area of California and lost power and cell service for 5 days due to wild fires? The reason I ask is because we lost power during Hurricane Charley for 8 days in Florida, luckily that was 1994, when we still used manual backups.
Noble1
Hey “Jarvis”, what’s the Bilderberg Group & Government up to next according to the way they’ve been behaving in regards to their historical behavior , LOL !
Oh really , is that where they’re heading ? Thanks ,we will position ourselves prior to .(wink)
In my humble opinion ………..