How TruckSmarter increased load booking rates by 20% with Phonic

The Challenge

At scale, voice AI’s promise wasn’t meeting production requirements

Trucking runs on phone calls. Over 95% of US carriers have fewer than 10 trucks, and no broker or system of record dominates. Every truckload gets manually booked over the phone.

TruckSmarter recognized that voice AI could do what no broker had: create a system of record for truckloads. Voice agents could collect load information, book loads, and even negotiate rates; this work used to require a human calling for every single load. For tens of thousands of small carriers on the platform, that's hours back that they could spend with their family instead.

TruckSmarter’s initial exploration of voice showed promise. At scale, it hit significant roadblocks:

• Models were continually confused by trucking-specific jargon
• Agents got stuck in repetitive loops when navigating an IVR
• Latency was high enough that callers routinely flagged them as AI
• Voice quality across vendors was plateauing, but still fell below their production-grade requirements
• Competing platforms didn’t offer flexibility to define complex voice agents

At scale, the promise of voice AI wasn’t meeting TruckSmarter’s production requirements. They reached out to Phonic and partnered together on a voice solution that was able to serve their production needs.

The Solution

Adopting a product purpose-built for human-like voice agents

One demo was enough for Nipun Dave, VP Engineering @ TruckSmarter, to greenlight a POC. Three reasons stood out:

1. Phonic isn't just an ASR/TTS model provider, and it isn't just an orchestration layer on top of someone else's models. Phonic co-designs voice agents as one system — the models are built for the orchestration, the orchestration is designed around the models, and forward-deployed engineers tune both against real production traffic. As a result, Phonic can optimize end-to-end agent accuracy in ways that are structurally impossible for other parties to do.
2. Phonic's voice quality felt noticably more engaging and human-like.
3. Phonic’s SDK provides control and extensibility to the user, which enabled TruckSmarter to move from simple voice calls to voice agents that could actually negotiate truck loads.

To get started, TruckSmarter was able to share a trove of existing calls where the agent was and wasn’t performing, which Phonic could use as training data to optimize the performance.

"It was exciting from a partnership standpoint because we did end up working a lot together in terms of A/B testing the two setups and then working with you all to identify what's working well, what were the gaps, and then you guys helped bridge those gaps fairly quickly."

Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter

Phonic worked with the TruckSmarter team to migrate their agents from Retell to Phonic and help tune agent performance towards their goals. This included, but was not limited to, fine-tuning voice models for TruckSmarter specific jargon.

Within a few weeks, Phonic's voice agents were delivering higher end-to-end success rates compared to the alternatives. Its speech-native stack meant structurally lower latencies and a better handling of industry-specific jargon. And because Phonic's SDK was built for multipurpose voice agents rather than a narrow customer-support use case, TruckSmarter could extend the agents from obtaining information to negotiating loads on its own.

"Now we have a voice agent that's a lot smarter than what I think we would have been able to set up somewhere else using one of the other providers."

Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter

Throughout both the POC and being in production since, Phonic helped deliver a superior voice experience compared to the competition. Nipun remarked on how excellent it was to work with the Phonic team:

"You guys are very responsive. Good clarity of thought, and the important other point being if you think you can commit to something, you say so. If you can't commit to something, then you're transparent on that front. So you weren't typical sales guys."

Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter

The Outcome

Since adopting Phonic, TruckSmarter has seen:

• End-to-end load booking rates increased by 20%
• Median latency decreased from 2.5s to 0.7s
• Addressable market size increased by 1.5x
• Pronunciation errors decreased by 100%

"By the end of it, the call success rates improved, and that's why we started sending more of the calls to Phonic than other providers. And then for some products, there's no other provider — we are just using Phonic directly because you guys provide certain capabilities that others don't."

Nipun Dave
VP Engineering, TruckSmarter