CLAAS

CLAAS employs more than 11,500 people worldwide and generated sales of 4.9 billion euros in the 2025 financial year.

Its learning ecosystem supports employees, distributors, and workshop technicians worldwide, ensuring a consistent understanding of complex machinery, product updates, and maintenance procedures. Training content must be accurate, scalable, and linguistically precise across more than 20 languages, reflecting the global footprint of the brand.

CLAAS relies on the CBTL EVOLUTION³ authoring software, as it enables the creation of structured, multimedia e-learning content. The e-learning courses are distributed via the CLAAS Academy Network. The choice of this authoring software underlines CLAAS’s commitment to maximum security and data protection.

The Challenge

As CLAAS expanded its digital learning programs, one challenge became increasingly visible: pronunciation accuracy. Training content includes a large number of proprietary product names, technical terms, and brand-specific vocabulary that must be pronounced consistently and correctly in every language.

Initially, CLAAS relied on standard text-to-speech voices to generate audio for training modules. While these solutions worked on a basic level, they consistently failed to pronounce CLAAS product names correctly—an issue that went far beyond mere cosmetics. In a sector where brand integrity and clear communication are essential, inconsistent pronunciation undermines the authenticity and impact of the CLAAS brand. Only a clear and passionate delivery of their message ensures that the CLAAS brand is truly experienced and trusted by those they serve.

The problem became more complex as content scaled across languages. CLAAS manages around 100 product and brand names that require accurate pronunciation in local customer languages. Manually correcting pronunciation using phonetic spelling rules proved unrealistic, time-consuming, and inconsistent. CLAAS needed a solution that respected its brand identity, supported linguistic complexity, and integrated seamlessly into its existing authoring and training environment.

The Solution

CLAAS partnered with ReadSpeaker to implement a customised text-to-speech solution designed specifically for corporate training and technical learning environments. Instead of relying on generic voices, ReadSpeaker worked with CLAAS on a dedicated linguistic and pronunciation project, ensuring that brand names, product terminology, and technical vocabulary were pronounced correctly and consistently across all required languages.

Both companies have been working together since 2017. As part of the project, a CLAAS data set with accent rules was created. This now contains trained brand and product names with a four-digit number of rules.  

The solution combines ReadSpeaker SpeechMaker and speechCloud API integration within the CBTL EVOLUTION³ authoring platform. This allows training authors to generate high-quality spoken audio directly from their e-learning content, without breaking their existing workflows. ReadSpeaker’s linguistic team plays a critical role, customising pronunciation dictionaries and voice behaviour in a way that would be extremely difficult to achieve with standard TTS providers.

For CLAAS, this approach ensures that training focuses on what truly matters: technical understanding, safety, and correct machine operation, rather than distracting learners with unnatural or incorrect audio. The result is a more professional, brand-aligned learning experience that scales globally and supports both internal staff and external partners.

This level of linguistic control has become a key differentiator for CLAAS, reinforcing the importance of voice quality and pronunciation in modern corporate learning, especially in a sector as important as agricultural machinery.

Interview with Matthias Ruch, Training Technology Engineer, at CLAAS

What challenges did you encounter when using standard text-to-speech voices for technical and product training at CLAAS?

Many CLAAS product and brand names aren’t recognized by standard text-to-speech voices, so we had to teach the system for our training materials. Non-Latin languages created unexpected challenges.

Why was a precise pronunciation of product names and technical terms so important for your training programs? 

This is one way to ensure clear recognition and association with the CLAAS brand and a premium manufacturer.

What was the role of the pronunciation dictionary and how was it created?

It is a standard element in the platform and customized for us.

How did the customised linguistic work with ReadSpeaker change the way audio is used across your e-learning content? How would you describe the importance of having a linguistics team to support in this process?

The support of the linguistics team enabled us to achieve excellent results—without their expertise, it would have just been trial and error.

How does the integration with your CBTL EVOLUTION³ authoring platform support your internal teams and training workflows? How did the integration work? Was it easy and simple?

With the API interface, authors can access text-to-speech directly within their production environment of EVOLUTION³.

What are the main benefits you’ve been experiencing when using the TTS technology from ReadSpeaker? (Costs, flexibility, localisation…)

Speed up localization and stay flexible with upcoming changes and updates.

Find out more about ReadSpeaker solutions for workplace learning