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

Nine hours into a haul across France, the fuel light is on and you just paid a speeding fine outside Lyon. The radio plays on. Nobody in the cab says a word. A Euro Truck Simulator 2 AI co-driver mod puts someone 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

Who a Euro Truck Simulator 2 AI co-driver mod is for

Long-haul players who drive for hours and want company that knows what is happening in the truck. Modders who already build SDK plugins and want to add dialogue. And anyone who would rather say "open the map" than reach for a key binding mid-corner. If you play American Truck Simulator, the same plugin works there too.

What the SCS SDK tells your co-driver

The official SCS SDK, currently version 1.16 for Windows, Linux and macOS, streams this data to native plugins:

Since SDK 1.14 the input API also lets a plugin create basic input devices, which the player binds to game controls like any other controller. That is how voice commands press buttons in the cab.

Plugin plus companion app

ETS2 and American Truck Simulator share one modding model with two halves. Content mods are .scs packages (trucks, trailers, maps, sounds, UI) in the mod folder or on Steam Workshop, documented on the official SCS modding wiki. SDK plugins are native code built against the SDK; on Windows they go in bin/win_x64/plugins inside the game folder.

The SDK has no in-game UI drawing, and that shapes a Neocortex mod. 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. Community projects such as the scs-sdk-plugin show how to share telemetry with another process through shared memory. The plugin stays light and the game never waits on the network.

Screenshot: Euro Truck Simulator 2 © SCS Software

A shift with your co-driver

You pick up a load in Lyon. The co-driver already knows the cargo, the deadline and the income, and has a personality you gave them: maybe a rookie who grows in confidence over a multi-day career arc, shaped by a Conversation Flow that returns checkpoint keywords (flowState) your mod reacts to. With a knowledge base about European roads, they make small talk about the city you are passing.

Three hours in, the fuel range drops. Ask "find the nearest fuel station" and the co-driver checks your range against the remaining route, tells you whether you will make it, and opens the map for you. Every line comes with an emotion tag, so a stressed co-driver sounds stressed.

At dusk you say "turn on the beacons" without taking a hand off the wheel. Control commands press the bound game control; questions like "how far to the drop-off?" are answered from telemetry by the co-driver. Players can chain commands in one sentence, push-to-talk or always listening.

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

The Neocortex pieces you will use

• 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: the career arc above.
• Quizzes: 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. Neocortex Voice Commands runs 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"). It works in multiple languages, which suits a game played all over Europe.

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

SCS rules, Convoy and TruckersMP

SCS Software openly supports modding through its modding wiki, the SDK and Steam Workshop. Keep the mod non-commercial and use it in single-player. 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.

Checklist before your first haul

• Download the SCS SDK from the modding wiki and build a minimal telemetry plugin into bin/win_x64/plugins.
• 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.
• Add a quiz and a voice command set for the cab.
• 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.
• Keep the API key in a config file the player fills in with their own key.
• Test on a single-player profile before sharing.

Start with one route and one co-driver who reacts to fuel and fines; Neocortex makes the rest a matter of adding events. 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