With the motto “Let the machines talk” the first Funke Digital Hackathon ended on Saturday, the 09th September. Funke Digital is the digital-branch of the Funke Media organization. 65 designer, programmers, journalists, students and coders came together in the Berlin Friedrichstraße from the 07th till 09th September to plan, create, despair and program their prototypes of AI, bots and voice assistants. To realize their ideas the best way possible, the teams had advisory support from Google, Amazon and Facebook.
To award the best out of the fourteen product-pitches the jury consisted of various experts of future communication: Isabelle Sonnenfeld (Leader Google News Lab), Annette Milz (Chief-Editor Medium Magazin), Ben Broshi (CDO Deutsche Telekom Medien), Andrea Muttoni (Technology Evangelist Amazon Alexa), Nico Adam (CEO UnitB Consulting), Stefanie Martin and Carmen Krippl for Funke Digital, Dirk Zeiler (CEO next media accelerator), Funke Digital-Chief Stefan Thurm and Marc Göbel, CTO ProDigitalis Medien.
The Jury chose these four winners of the Funke Digital Hackathons 2017:
- The price "Bot your Butler" worth 2.000 Euro of the Deutsche Tele Medien was given to team "Voicify". Their idea brings the existing product collection of smaller businesses in an own Alexa shopping-skill.
- The Amazon Alexa-price "Voice of the News/News of the Voice" went to the team „Silverlake“. They developed a real-estate skill where Alexa works as a smart assistant for property purchase.
- The „best innovation“ 1.000-Euro price, presented from UnitB Consulting was given to team “Dynamike”, which created an interactive storytelling-skill for children.
- The 3.000 Euro award „Best Overall“ presented from Facebook and Funke Digital went to team FunkQ, whose Alexa skill aims to bring journalism and voice assistants closer together.
For Marc Göbel the Funke Digital Hackathon proofed how important the role of voice is for future technique: „It was fascinating to see how various the application areas of voice assistants can be. The Hackathon presented different ideas for shopping, property, storytelling up to banking-skills. In the past 72 hours, every team gained a lot of insight and knowledge about chatbots and voice assistants. I am very grateful that I was part of this Hackathon. My respect goes to every participant who made it until the end and to the great organization and support-team.”