Frequent customization requests led to expensive rework

The Issue:

At one company I worked at we made custom training materials on behalf of customers. Sometimes this was not an issue as we could build the module from the ground up, but in other cases the customers wanted us to take an existing training course and modify it for their specific state, county, city, or company regulations. This often required us to either track down the original voice artist that recorded the audio track and contract them to record new lines, or to hire a new voice artist to redo the entire training module. The voice artists we were using were expensive, and had an average cost of $75/hr, often with a 1 hour minimum charge. Even if the customer wanted a small portion of the training modified it still required us to pay a minimum of $75 in audio fees, or else deliver them a course with mix-matched voice-overs, which we felt was unprofessional.

We would get these requests about once per month.

The Solution: 

In searching for alternatives a found a small, startup company that generated AI voices based on research and work done by a major university. The voices were significantly better than the robotic voices from IBM, Amazon, and other large companies like that. Additionally, since this program was an AI software program it meant that we could generate the audio immediately whenever we needed and did not have to wait for the human voice artist to get back to us. This expedited our turnaround time on these projects.

The Results: 

Our custom training work projects were able to be completed 22% faster by using the on-demand AI voice.
Typical training courses were 1 hour in length and the new program had an average cost of $8/hr. At one course per month we saved $804 in audio costs during the first year alone for custom work projects.
We also used this tool to rebuild our main training library as we revamped courses, which was an additional audio savings of $3,350 in the first year, bringing the total saved to $4,154.