HANDOUT --- Embark is a new self-driving truck company that has begun testing its autonomous big rig in Nevada. As autonomous vehicle companies develop and test self-driving trucks, a study released last week has identified the five most productive freeway corridors in the United States. To identify testing and deployment routes with the greatest potential, the transportation analytics company INRIX singled out five highway corridors by averaging normalized congestion, volume, length and incident rates. It also listed the top 10 corridors for safety improvements and commercial returns. Automated freight could replace 50 to 70 percent of truck drivers across the nation by 2030, according to a study by the International Transport Forum, an intergovernmental think tank for transportation policy.

INRIX chose its criteria based on a future business model where an autonomous truck powered by electric batteries or diesel-hybrid motors would cross long highway miles and then be taken over by people who would pilot the rigs through crowded cities to the final loading dock or port, said Avery Ash, INRIX's autonomous vehicle director.

Say you wake up tomorrow morning and there's a robo-truck just sitting in your driveway. Today, no one really has a self-driving truck yet--though plenty are working on it. Even the US Army is in on the act. Their advances--and testing operations in states like Nevada, California, Florida, Arizona, and Georgia--are impressive, but not there yet. Still, the tech should arrive one day, which is why that thought experiment is helpful.

For a species that would like to see self-driving cars stick to the letter of the law, we humans don't make things easy. We let lane lines fade and stop signs fall down. We fail to mark speed limits and flag pop-up construction sites. For the most part, humans can handle this lack of clarity. For robots, it can be baffling.

Amazon's Alexa assistant can already communicate with some cars, but the conversations are a little one-sided. You can tell your home-bound Echo to start warming up your Hyundai on a frosty day, for example, or send directions to your BMW ahead of setting off; but when you're on the road, you're on your own. Later this year, though, car makers will be able to put Alexa in the passenger seat, giving drivers a virtual assistant that'll put on some tunes, load up an audiobook and carry out many other tasks while their hands are stuck to the wheel. This won't be a result of individual car brand partnerships, however. Instead, Inrix is working to integrate Alexa into its OpenCar platform, which vehicle manufacturers can take and shape into their own, branded infotainment systems -- similar to BlackBerry's QNX platform, which could be powering your ride's dash even if you don't know it.

VoiceBox Technologies, the provider of Contextual Voice Interface technology and Voice Artificial Intelligence platform has announced new VoiceBox Automotive Software Development Kit (v5.0), now available for Windows, Linux and Android platforms and has also announced integration of its Voice AI into the INRIX Open Car platform. With VoiceBox's Contextual Natural Language Understanding (CNLU) and Voice AI for the connected car, mobile, home and IoT markets, the SDK v5.0 will provide automotive companies a platform for in-car voice systems. VoiceBox's INRIX integration will help automotive companies control their in-car experience through INRIX's Open Car platform. INRIX is a SaaS and DaaS company which provides a variety of Internet services and mobile applications pertaining to road traffic and driver services. The company claims that the Automotive SDK is the first of its kind to offer Deep Neural Networks (DNN) that enables the processing of complex, contextual conversations.