Euro Truck Simulator 2 AI Co-Driver Mod with Voice Commands

Long hauls in Euro Truck Simulator 2 are quiet. The radio helps, but nobody in the cab notices that you have been driving for nine hours, that the fuel light is on or that you just paid a speeding fine outside Lyon. A Euro Truck Simulator 2 AI co-driver mod fixes that: a character in the passenger seat who reads live telemetry and talks about your delivery, your driving and the road ahead. Neocortex supplies the co-driver, their voice, quizzes and on-device voice commands, and an SCS SDK plugin connects them to the truck.

Screenshot: Euro Truck Simulator 2 © SCS Software

What you could build with Neocortex in Euro Truck Simulator 2

A co-driver who knows the job

The SDK reports the job in detail: source and destination companies, cargo and its mass, income, planned distance, delivery deadline, cargo damage. It also reports fuel and estimated range, navigation distance and time, the next rest stop and the current speed limit. Your plugin sends the important bits to a co-driver character as events: "fuel range 140 km, 210 km to the drop-off", "next rest stop due in 40 minutes", "fined for speeding", "cargo damage 6%". The co-driver comments in character, reminds you to stop, teases you about the fine, and congratulates you on a clean delivery. Every line comes with an emotion tag, so a stressed co-driver sounds stressed. Give them a personality and a knowledge base about European roads and they also make small talk about the city you are passing.

Voice commands for the cab

With Neocortex Voice Commands, the player says "turn on the beacons", "open the map" or "how far to the drop-off?" without taking a hand off the wheel. Your plugin receives the matched command: control commands press the bound game control, and questions are answered from telemetry by the co-driver. "Find the nearest fuel station" works the same way: the co-driver checks your range against the remaining route, tells you whether you will make it, and opens the map for you. Players can chain commands in one sentence, push-to-talk or always listening.

A road-rules and geography quiz

Six hours on the motorway is a good time for a quiz. Build question sets about road signs, traffic rules, capitals and landmarks in the Neocortex dashboard, and the co-driver runs the quiz through the quiz engine (Team plan) with scoring and a leaderboard. The player answers out loud through speech-to-text.

How Euro Truck Simulator 2 modding works

ETS2 and American Truck Simulator share one modding model with two halves:

• Content mods are .scs packages (trucks, trailers, maps, sounds, UI) placed in the mod folder or published on Steam Workshop. Documentation and tools live on the official SCS modding wiki.
• SDK plugins are native code built against the official SCS SDK, currently version 1.16, for Windows, Linux and macOS. The telemetry API streams truck, trailer, job and navigation data plus gameplay events (job delivered, fined, tollgate, ferry, train, refuel). Since SDK 1.14 the input API lets a plugin create basic input devices, which the player binds to game controls like any other controller.

On Windows, plugins go in bin/win_x64/plugins inside the game folder. Community projects such as the scs-sdk-plugin show how to share telemetry with another process through shared memory.

This shapes a Neocortex mod. The SDK has no in-game UI drawing, so the usual pattern is a small native plugin that collects telemetry and handles input, plus a companion app or overlay window that calls the Neocortex API, shows the dialogue and plays the voice. The plugin stays light and the game never waits on the network.

Screenshot: Euro Truck Simulator 2 © SCS Software

How Neocortex fits in

• Dialogue: the plugin reads telemetry, the companion app sends it with the player's line to a Neocortex co-driver (/v3/chat), shows the reply in the overlay, plays the voice from /v3/audio/generate or /v3/audio/stream, and runs the actions the character returns, such as { "name": "TOGGLE_BEACON" }.
• Conversation Flows: a flow can shape a multi-day career arc, like a rookie co-driver who grows in confidence, returning checkpoint keywords (flowState) the mod reacts to.
• Quizzes: the quiz engine runs the long-haul quiz, scoring and leaderboard through /v3/quiz.
• Voice commands: on-device voice commands turn speech into game actions without a cloud round trip. The mod uses the Neocortex Voice Commands library on the player's machine, and you design the command set in the dashboard as actors ("co-driver"), actions ("turn on", "open", "check") and objects ("beacons", "map", "fuel"). Works in multiple languages, which suits a game played all over Europe.

Getting started

1. Download the SCS SDK from the modding wiki and build a minimal telemetry plugin into bin/win_x64/plugins.
2. Design your co-driver in the Neocortex visual editor: personality, emotions, a knowledge base about roads and cities, voice. Test them in the browser for free.
3. Add a quiz and a voice command set for the cab.
4. Build the companion app or overlay that reads telemetry from the plugin, calls the Neocortex API and plays audio. Add the input device for control commands.
5. Keep the API key in a config file the player fills in with their own key.
6. Test on a single-player profile before sharing.

Voice Commands is a licensed SDK: contact us for a Voice Commands license.

Mod policy and fair play

SCS Software openly supports modding through its modding wiki, the SDK and Steam Workshop. Keep the mod non-commercial, use it in single-player, and in Convoy sessions or third-party multiplayer such as TruckersMP follow the host's or server's rules. Each player uses their own Neocortex API key.

If you build for simulators, our MSFS AI copilot with voice commands guide uses the same co-pilot pattern. For the voice side, read about on-device voice commands for game mods, and see every game in our AI NPC and voice command mods index.

Tool versions and links checked October 2026. Modding tools change often; check each project's page for the latest release.

Frequently Asked Questions