Interview: Weathernews Inc.
Original Language: Japanese | 日本語はこちら
We interviewed Weathernews Inc. who has recently started using Kiara in their company.
About Weathernews Inc.
Weathernews was established based on the strong desire to “save the lives of sailors” after its founder, Hiroyoshi Ishibashi, experienced a tragic marine accident in 1970.
Its meteorological services were first provided to the shipping industry, which began at sea, and now has expanded to other industries such as aviation include the air and land transportation, and under its the slogan “Helping out people in times of need.,” Weathernews currently provides weather information to diverse markets for all fields to customers in approximately about 50 countries around the world.
In addition to its existing services that provide solutions to weather-related risks, they are also taking on new challenges to deliver new value to people around the world, such as its WxTech weather data provision and analysis service that promotes corporate digitalization DX, and new businesses to help mitigate or address cope with climate change.
What issues did you experience before using Kiara?
We are one of the world’s largest weather information companies, operating in 21 countries. Based on our philosophy of “helping out in times of need,” we employ talents in Japan and abroad who share the same passion.
Because we are dealing with natural phenomena that changes constantly, our communication in Slack is very fast-paced. For some time, we have been talking about how we could improve the speed of our business and internal communication if we could read the content that comes in one after another, not only in Japanese and English, but also in our native languages.
In order to further globalize our business, we decided to use your service, which supports automatic translation in 100 languages, in order to reduce the risk of misunderstanding and improve the quality of our work.
How exactly does Kiara solve this?
We have staff of many different nationalities participating in a single channel, and the native language of the members can vary from English, Chinese, French, Danish, and even Greek. Since weather information is exchanged 24 hours a day, Kiara’s automatic translation into multiple languages allows each staff member to understand the content efficiently.
One team reported that they were able to translate the content of their meeting in almost real time for non-Japanese-speaking participants by typing the content in Japanese into a Slack channel and having Kiara translate it.
If you were to recommend Kiara, which team would you recommend use it?
We would recommend it to teams with diverse nationalities and have frequent communication.
The translation speed is excellent, the flag icons next to the translations are easy to see, the ability to turn translation on and off, and the function to translate within threads as replies is also useful.
Eliminating language barriers is an essential factor in improving the quality of communication. Kiara helps promote more communication because people can feel more comfortable in reaching out to each other and working together despite the differences in language.
We are very honored to assist Weathernews, a leading company in the meteorological information sector.
Thank you very much for kindly taking the time for this interview.
