WOW! What a year!
2023 was another extremely exciting year for us at Aristech. From many new customers, exciting events and even a few awards, it was all there.
A very prominent topic: since the beginning of the year, the ChatGPT hype has finally triggered the "AI turnaround" in Germany too. As AI voice specialists, this has brought us a lot of attention and it is clearly noticeable that our technologies, especially as a European alternative, are increasingly in demand. The question of how AI applications can be used GDPR compliant is of particular concern to us and many other software companies. Our insight of the year: The focus on sovereignty, first-class and, above all, secure technology pays off!
In line with our philosophy, we have continued to focus fully on technological development this year. We are proud to say that we have launched extremely exciting new solutions, which are already in operation at some of our customers sites.
Our initial thanks therefore go above all to our great Aristech team! And also to the many followers who have joined us on social media this year! In addition, of course, a big thank you to our customers and partner companies. This year, we found strong software and integration partners that complement our technology perfectly.
The year 2023 was full of highlights for our team and for the company. We would like to share a few of these highlights here in chronological order:
We started the new decade of our company history with two trade fairs in the first half of the year. Our team was represented with a stand at both CCW Berlin and E-World in Essen. Fittingly, the E-World was followed by an exciting webinar on the topic of "AI automation of customer service for energy suppliers", in which Ralf Eichmann also shared his experiences from the customer's perspective.
A special highlight this year was the SAS AI Night. Not only is it nice to be among the AI elite of the city of Heidelberg and to exchange ideas with each other, but also to be voted Best Speaker by them for the presentation of our CEO Carolin Edler-Mende. This shows that ambition, innovative spirit and enthusiasm for technology pay off. Many thanks for the great event.
In the summer, we took part in the Girls' Digital Camps. Just like Girls' Day, the Girls' Coding Camp is an initiative that is particularly important to us in order to demonstrate to young girls that the tech world is exciting and exciting and, above all, open to everyone! In September, we also welcomed our new apprentice (IT specialist in application development). One thing is almost as important to us as a company as the development of new software: the training of young IT talent.
And now, at the end of the year, we were able to hold a webinar with our partner Voicetec.io, which offered the "how" to our "what" in voice analysis and quality monitoring. This was about how to get the key to customer loyalty and ensure an excellent customer experience through AI-based quality analysis.
We were then able to welcome the end of the year with yet another great success. The Service Summit in Hamburg in November was an absolute triumph for us and marked the grand finale to our 2023 trade fair year. The crowds at both our Managing Director's masterclass and our stand were huge.
Our Research Year 2023
A lot has also happened in our research projects. Here, too, you can see that 2023 was the year of further development for us.
In the Sprachversteher project, the demo app was launched this year. By the end of the year, the first results of the studies with the demo app are now pointing towards a positive direction for the effectiveness of the advancements. Further subject studies will then take place at the beginning of the new year.
Together with our project partners at the ENT Clinic at Heidelberg University Hospital, we at Sprachversteher are researching an innovative system to improve speech comprehension for people with age-related hearing loss.
At VoluProf, our project team created the first audio recordings of an actual lecturer at the University of Rostock in the Filmstadt Babelsberg, which will later be used for the "VoluProf" avatar. User studies were also carried out with students from the University of Rostock using the early VoluProf demonstrator. Furthermore, the demonstrator was presented as part of the Living Lab - XR-Interakt in Fellbach.
Together with our project partners (Deutsche Telekom AG, Volucap GmbH, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), University of Rostock), an interactive mixed reality format for online teaching is being developed as part of VoluProf. Students and pupils will be able to communicate with a lecturer avatar with the help of STT and TTS and via a chat system. The project combines the advantages of traditional lectures and online teaching environments for the first time, in which lecturers are not only present and intangible on the video screen, but also virtually.
The joint demonstrator, including an initial version of the web interface, was integrated into SLIK in 2023. The project was also presented at the "BMBF SME Conference 2023 - Strengthening SMEs through digital innovations".
The funding project "SLiK - Synthese Linguistischer Korpusdaten" provides tools for generating domain-specific synthetic language data for SMEs. We bring together the expertise of Aristech GmbH in the field of speech recognition and text-to-speech, Kauz GmbH in the field of rule-based analysis and generation of written language data and Saarland University in the field of low-resource deep learning.
All three projects are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
As this insight into our year 2023 shows, we had a lot going on. At the end of this year, the Aristech team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2024! We are looking forward to next year, as we already have some exciting projects and activities planned. We are starting 2024 with full vigor!