New Type of Voice Assistant Works According to Rules of AI Ethics

The EU research project COALA, led by BIBA, has been successfully completed. 14 partners from 5 countries have developed a digital voice assistant for production. The system can support the work, qualification, and knowledge transfer of employees via smartphone or tablet and partly “significantly improve” costs and time expenditure. One focus of the project was on the trustworthy use of artificial intelligence. The EU funded the project with 5.7 million euros.

Result: Partly “significant improvements“
Among other things, COALA helps simplify and speed up training times on machines and systems and avoids quality problems. According to projections based on the field test at Whirlpool, defects identified with COALA support can be reduced by more than 50 percent in some cases. Due to a lower number of calls per plant and a lower number of service calls to end customers, the company was also able to achieve a 20 percent reduction in organizational costs in this area with COALA.

In addition, evaluations at CittaStudi (Textile Academy) showed a significant improvement in task performance by 42 percent compared to the basic scenario without COALA. The COALA assistant implemented at project partner Diversey achieved the highest value in the transfer of implicit knowledge according to the field tests and evaluations, followed by a 30 percent reduction in the time required to process problems and a 50 percent reduction in training time.

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BIBA Press Release