Tata Motors, an Indian car manufacturer has partnered with what3words so drivers can enter a 3 word address by voice or text and get directions to that exact location.
India is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, but the absence of an addressing standard can make it difficult to conduct business efficiently and can get in the way of rapid development. Addressing formats vary from region to region, streets are unnamed and buildings are unnumbered, and new buildings and developments pop up at an incredible speed. This makes it hard to describe precise locations or input an exact destination into a navigation device.
Tata Motors has partnered with what3words to enable drivers to enter a 3 word address by voice or text input, then navigate to that precise place. Drivers will be able to enter destinations in 36 languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi.
People find entering addresses by voice into their sat navs frustrating and ineffective. That’s because multiple streets in an area can have the same name or be very similar, addresses can take a while to be assigned to new builds, and pins drop in the center of the building instead of a specific entrance, car park or meeting point. Finally, most remote or rural locations don’t have an address, so getting to them is hard – and near impossible for tourists.
A 3 word address is very easy to enter into any car navigation system, manually or via speech recognition: every address is unique, similar words are placed far apart to avoid confusion, and the intelligent AutoSuggest feature helps drivers to spot and correct their mistakes immediately.
Around the world, drivers of select Mercedes-Benz cars can already use what3words to input destinations by voice or text directly into their satnavs, and Ford drivers can use the system via Ford Applink in their cars.