Meet Our Team
We are your partner for streamlining operations and enhancing productivity with voice-enabled digital assistants, so you can focus on achieving your goals.
Background and history
We acquired most of our expertise over several years through applied research with industrial end users. Along these years, new technology emerged (think of GPT) that we adapted and integrated to improve user experience.
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2024
This year was a busy year where Sahan joined our team, we registered the COALA logo as a brand, enhanced our product, and founded the company as COALA AI GmbH.
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2023
Stefan and Mina participated in the CAMPUSiDEEN competition in Bremen with a business idea for the COALA voice assistant. They won the second place and a special price for IPR protection. This motivation boost triggered the detailed business planning.
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2022-Now
Stefan and Mina acquired WASABI, a collaborative innovation project with a budget of almost 9 million Euros funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program. One of WASABI’s goals is to build and test additional assistants for manufacturing using the technical infrastructure established by the COALA project. Stefan coordinates the overall assistant development and Mina builds and tests three assistants.
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2021-2023
Stefan acquired and coordinated COALA, a collaborative research project with a budget of 6 million Euros funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program. The COALA project demonstrated two sophisticated assistants, one for augmented manufacturing analytics and one for workers’ cognitive support. While Mina focused on designing and building the analytics assistant, Stefan steered the overall project and built the assistant’s technical infrastructure. COALA tested its assistants with companies producing white goods, textiles, and chemical products. All three praised the prototypes and we concluded that we need a start-up to commercialize them.
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2020
Stefan acquired a one-year grant for building and testing a voice-based predictive maintenance assistant using the open-source framework Mycroft which is now succeeded by OVOS (www.openvoiceos.org). Mina and Stefan tested the prototype in white goods production and medical device manufacturing. This proof-of-concept gave us first feedback from actual users, built the technological basis for further prototypes, and created a first go-to-market strategy.
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2019
The starting point for our work with voice-based assistance in industrial environments was in summer 2019. At that time, Mina and Stefan built an assistant prototype for a product-tracking demonstrator running in BIBA’s research shop floor. It used Amazon Alexa and an Echo Show device to let users know where specific items where in the production, and which temperatures and humidity they where exposed to. We quickly understood that Alexa is not the right tool for us, foremost, because of its data privacy issues.
