Ondoku Case Study: Toyota Industries Cuts Narration Costs to Meet Budget

• Toyota Industries Corporation
• Scale: Approx. 75,000 employees (Group-wide)
• Industry: Machinery
• Interviews: Mr. Masuda, Mr. Kogishi

Objectives / Challenges

Used for creating English and Chinese narration for the purpose of sharing information via video data with overseas bases.
Outsourcing the work would cost more than twice the budget.

Solution

Utilized Ondoku, which can read text aloud in English and Chinese, for the narration parts.

Results

Successfully insourced narration creation, reducing costs to less than half.
In addition to keeping the project within budget, work efficiency improved significantly.

Introduction of the Company and Department

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

With global business operations, we have continued to grow in collaboration with overseas bases around the world. We also focus on environmental initiatives and promote activities to create a society where people and nature coexist, such as the maintenance of animal paths, "Birdpiers," and biotopes.

The Quality Management Division, HR Development Group, which uses Ondoku, is responsible for the development of technical employees. In particular, its main duty is the management of "QC Circles" (improvement activities aimed at human resource development within the company) held across overseas group affiliates.

HP: Toyota Industries Corporation

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

As part of our global expansion, we decided to introduce it after determining it was a tool that could allow us to handle narration for presentation materials and other videos entirely in-house.

Our company holds a "Global QC Circle" convention about once a year to improve quality within the company. With over 600 circles in Japan alone, this is a venue where selected bases from around the world 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 it with each overseas base. Therefore, accurate translation and the implementation of easy-to-understand narration were essential.

However, we found that outsourcing both translation and narration would cost more than twice our budget. While considering what to do, we discovered this text-to-speech tool that allows narration work to be completed entirely in-house.

Could you tell us how you came to adopt Ondoku?

It was because the English and Chinese intonations were the closest to reality among the services we considered.

As a global company, we have many employees who speak multiple languages, including English and Chinese. When we had those employees listen to several candidates for text-to-speech tools, Ondoku was rated as having the most natural intonation.

Additionally, the fact that we could easily try it out for up to 5,000 characters for free was one of the reasons it was easy to adopt. While there were other services that could be used for 0 yen, they required email registration or had specifications that were cumbersome for corporate use, so we gave up on those.

As a result of our evaluation, we chose Ondoku because it not only allowed us to test actual voices without spending money but was also strong in multi-language support.

Compared to before the introduction of Ondoku, have your company's challenges been resolved (or improved)?

By introducing Ondoku, the cost of narration work has been halved, and we have succeeded in keeping the project within budget.

Furthermore, by switching from outsourcing to in-house production, the fact that corrections can now be made smoothly 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 utilize Ondoku to its full potential during the season of the annual Global QC Circle convention.

[Slides that actually utilized Ondoku]

English Ver.

Chinese Ver.

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

We would like to request further quality improvements in intonation when reading aloud in Japanese. While the foreign language voices are well-received by local bases, it may take some effort to adjust fine intonations in Japanese.

Also, it would be great to have a function that accurately reads technical terms specific to the industry. These professional areas are things we want to communicate with particular care.

Finally, it would help if the alphabet could be read correctly. For example, when entering "TICO," there were cases where it was read as "Tiko" and other 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 Chinese base that thanks to Ondoku, the workload has been reduced.

Previously, there was a task where information sent in English (translated from Japanese) had to be further translated into Chinese locally. However, now that Chinese audio is being sent thanks to Ondoku, they seem to have been freed from that redundant work.

Additionally, there was an instance where an employee who had a reporting session using an English report used Ondoku for listening practice.

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

How do you intend to use Ondoku in the future?

I think it would be interesting and convenient if we could leave the emceeing of the QC Circle convention to Ondoku.

When announcing circle names or themes, there are times when the emcee cannot read them well, causing the proceedings to stop. Also, it is necessary to secure personnel who can handle each mother tongue, which incurs costs. Since Ondoku can handle multiple languages, I see potential there.

Furthermore, since we currently only use it for English and Chinese, we would like to actively utilize it for Italian, French, German, and other languages. While our current system cannot expand that far yet, we would like 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, it might become even easier for us to use in our operations.

By utilizing Ondoku, you achieved a cost reduction of more than half and successfully kept the project within budget! Thank you for telling us about such a wonderful case study.

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