Bringing costs that were double the initial amount back within budget at once by utilizing Ondoku! Toyota Industries Corporation Case Study Introduction

• Toyota Industries Corporation
• Scale: Approx. 75,000 employees (entire group)
• Industry: Machinery
• Interviewees: Mr. Masuda, Mr. Kogishi

Objectives & Challenges

Used for creating English and Chinese narration for the purpose of sharing information with overseas locations via video data.
Outsourcing would result in costs more than double the budget.

Solution

Assigned the narration part to Ondoku, which is capable of reading aloud in English and Chinese.

Results

Succeeded in bringing narration creation in-house, reducing costs to less than half.
Not only did the project stay within budget, but work efficiency also significantly increased.

Company and Department Introduction

Our main business is the manufacturing and sales of industrial vehicles, automotive parts, and textile machinery. Among these, forklifts, car air-conditioning compressors, and air-jet looms boast the top global market share.

We have continued to grow through global-scale business development, collaborating with overseas bases around the world. We are also focusing on environmental initiatives, promoting activities to create a society where people and nature coexist, such as maintaining animal paths, bird piers, and biotopes.

The Quality Control Division Human Resources Development Group, which uses Ondoku, is a department responsible for training technical employees. Their primary work involves managing "QC Circles" (improvement activities aimed at internal human resource development) that are rolled out and held at overseas group affiliates.

HP: Toyota Industries Corporation

Please tell us about the background behind introducing the text-to-speech tool.

As part of our global expansion, we introduced it because we determined it was a tool that could handle video presentations and materials entirely in-house.

At our company, we hold the "Global QC Circle" convention approximately once a year to improve internal quality. With over 600 circles in Japan alone, this is a venue where selected locations, including those overseas, present the results of their daily activities.

The video data projected at the Global QC Circle convention needs to be converted into English and Chinese for the purpose of sharing with each overseas location. Therefore, accurate translation and easy-to-hear narration were essential.

However, we found that outsourcing translation and narration would cost more than double our budget. While looking for a solution, we encountered a text-to-speech tool that allows us to complete narration work entirely within the company.

Could you tell us how you came to adopt Ondoku?

Because the English and Chinese intonations were the closest to real speech among the services we considered.

Being a globally expanding company, we have many employees who speak multiple languages, such as English and Chinese. When we had these employees listen to several text-to-speech tool candidates, Ondoku was rated as having the most realistic intonation.

Also, the fact that we could easily try up to 5,000 characters for free was one of the reasons it was easy to adopt. While there were other services available for zero yen, they required email registration or had specifications that were cumbersome for a company to use, so we gave up on them.

As a result of our consideration, we chose Ondoku because it not only allows us to try actual voices without spending money but is also strong in multi-language support.

Compared to before introducing Ondoku, have your company's challenges been resolved (improved)?

With the introduction of Ondoku, narration costs were halved, and we succeeded in keeping the project within budget.

Furthermore, switching from outsourcing to in-house production made corrections smoother, which is a major improvement.

Before using Ondoku, even if we wanted to fix just a small part of the narration, we had to communicate with the contractor every time. Now that we can complete the work in-house, it has also led to a reduction in time costs.

We make full use of Ondoku during the season of the annual Global QC Circle convention.

[Slides actually using Ondoku]

English Ver.

Chinese Ver.

If you have any further requests for improvement for Ondoku, please let us know.

We request further quality improvements for intonation when reading in Japanese. Foreign language voices are well-received locally, but it might take some effort to adjust fine intonations in Japanese.

Also, we would be happy if there were a function to accurately read technical terms specific to our industry. We want to be particularly careful when communicating these specialized parts.

Finally, it would be helpful if it could read alphabets correctly. For example, when "TICO" was entered, there were cases where it was read as "Tico" and cases where it was played as a completely different word. We look forward to improvements for better work efficiency.

Have you received any feedback regarding Ondoku within the group?

We have heard from our China location that the effort required for work has been reduced thanks to Ondoku.

Until now, information sent in English (translated from Japanese) had to be further translated into Chinese locally. However, since we started sending Chinese audio via Ondoku, they seem to have been freed from such redundant work.

Also, there was an instance where an employee who had a reporting session using an English report used Ondoku to study listening.

They had Ondoku read the text in the report in English and practiced their intonation before the actual presentation.

How do you plan to use Ondoku in the future?

It would be interesting and convenient if we could leave the MCing of the QC Circle convention to Ondoku.

When announcing circle names or themes, the MC sometimes struggles to read them, causing the proceedings to stop. Also, securing personnel who can handle each mother tongue is necessary and incurs costs. Since Ondoku can handle multiple languages, we see potential there.

In addition, since we currently only use it for English and Chinese, we would like to actively use it for Italian, French, German, etc. While we cannot expand that far under our current system, we want to rely on Ondoku when the time comes.

Also, we would be happy if Ondoku could expand its sales further. If its name recognition and reliability increase, I think it will become even easier for us to use in our work.

By using Ondoku, you reduced costs to less than half of the initial amount and successfully kept the project within budget! Thank you for sharing such a wonderful case study.

Ondoku is a text-to-speech service that can be used for commercial purposes for free. It supports 80 languages and dialects, with a total of over 650 speakers. You can listen to voice types and sample audio for supported languages here.

■ AI voice synthesis software "Ondoku"

"Ondoku" is an online text-to-speech tool that can be used with no initial costs.

• Supports approximately 50 languages, including Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, French, and German
• Available from both PC and smartphone
• Suitable for business, education, entertainment, etc.
• No installation required, can be used immediately from your browser
• Supports reading from images

To use it, simply enter text or upload a file on the site. A natural-sounding audio file will be generated within seconds. You can use voice synthesis up to 5,000 characters for free, so please give it a try.

Text-to-speech software "Ondoku" can read out 5000 characters every month with AI voice for free. You can easily download MP3s and commercial use is also possible. If you sign up for free, you can convert up to 5,000 characters per month for free from text to speech. Try Ondoku now.

HP: ondoku3.com
Email: ondoku3.com@gmail.com