The Garage 336
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INDUSTRYNEWS<br />
Industry insight<br />
what3words<br />
Recently the importance of what3words has<br />
been highlighted in the news, as the brand<br />
and technology becomes more integral to our<br />
every day life, we talk to Josh Rayner from the<br />
company as he looks at the reasons as to the app<br />
now taking off as well as the future of the brand.<br />
<strong>The</strong> what3words app took off by being installed in new A Class<br />
Mercedes, the automotive industry really is embracing your<br />
technology.<br />
It certainly seems that what3words is taking off and becoming<br />
a standard within the OEM sector as a whole. <strong>The</strong>re really has<br />
been an increasing focus on voice navigation and vehicles.<br />
Lots of things are moving towards voice and software rather<br />
than touchscreen and typing. So, I think that there’s definitely<br />
steps to work out how, or what is the best way to allow people<br />
to input those locations easily inside their vehicles. Mercedes<br />
Benz was the first and they have a really good native system in<br />
all new cars were what3words can be voice or typed input into<br />
their system.<br />
Another industry where your app is used is the recovery industry,<br />
which is proving very successful.<br />
Anyone can use what3words, any organisation or member<br />
of the public. You can download our app or use our map<br />
site for free. You can start training call handling staff to use<br />
these and help improve customer service. what3words is a<br />
global standard, and we want people and organisations to<br />
go out there and use this system. We are also able to build<br />
our technology, our core API, into any system that uses<br />
coordinates, this means that you will be able to type in a three<br />
word address and geocode that location within our system.<br />
what3words are having an impact on the whole of the automotive<br />
industry.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s been huge strides, and one of the key things to get<br />
right in the automotive sector is the technology partnerships.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sort of partners that provide the mapping behind the<br />
software used by OEMs and car makers, for example Bosch,<br />
Tom Tom and Amazon Alexa. We now have 10 automotive<br />
partners on board including Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi, Lotus,<br />
Lamborghini, Triumph, Tata, Ford, VinFast, and Volta trucks<br />
recently, which we announced at CES 2022. So there really has<br />
been a lot of progress in this area. I think that one of the really<br />
big advantages of what3words is a system that is completely<br />
global and can be used in 50 languages. So, if you’re driving<br />
your car in Germany, or in France, you can navigate that<br />
country using your English voice input for navigation.<br />
We’ve heard some great examples of how the technology can<br />
pinpoint someone, especially in an emergency situation.<br />
One of the projects I’ve been managing for the last year or<br />
so has been the UK emergency services projects. This wasn’t<br />
something that what3words set out to do. It was a originally an<br />
organic use case by certain emergency services who wanted<br />
to use what3words within their operations. It really has taken<br />
off, and now over 85% of automotive services in the UK now<br />
accept a what3words address over 999 which is amazing to<br />
see. We see daily stories of it being used to help find people<br />
or help find people in distressing situations, breakdowns, or<br />
particularly cross organisational situations.<br />
6 THE GARAGE<br />
6, 7 Industry Insight.indd 1 21/02/2022 16:26
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