We really love language, conversations, and sustainability at VUI.agency. More than 70% of our team are linguists and language experts so you can imagine that besides creating the next best voice assistant for top brands, we also have a lot of talks and debates on a lot of topics. You will hear us talk about user journeys, multimodality, bias, ethics, and sustainability. And because sustainability is one of the core topics in our conversations and vision, we wanted to do more about it.
That’s how at the end of 2020, for Christmas, our company gave each employee a sum to help a few communities to make their voices heard. All the projects were mindfully chosen according to climate goals and world pressing problems by members of our team. Then each of us, having the same amount of money, donated to the project that resonated the most with our values.
As a second step, we are creating a sustainability page on our website to share the projects that we support throughout the year. By doing so, we hope to inspire our readers, clients, friends, and people landing on our website to think more about sustainability and how they can contribute. In 2021, we think that every company should have sustainability in mind.
“Christmas for me is always a time of also giving something back. Having the chance to do so together with the whole VUI.agency team makes me really happy.
VUI.agency is all about the team and its brilliant people. To raise awareness for helping others not only on Christmas we created our sustainability page, to keep going throughout the whole year.”
“One of the values that are very important to all our team members is sustainability. For the world as a whole, sustainability entails helping people in need.
That’s why we wanted to give our team members the opportunity to help less fortunate people for Christmas. Indeed, our team enjoyed very much this gift of giving and isn’t that one of the great messages of Christmas – Making others happy makes ourselves happy.”
With this project, we want to help support the current reforestation effort with a tree sponsorship, which secures the reforestation area in the long term through maintenance, species protection projects, and the purchase of land for the preservation of the Mata Atlântica.
In 2020, a total of roughly 124,000 IT specialist jobs might be unfilled.
ReDI School of Digital Integration is a non-profit tech school that is trying to solve this problem by creating IT industry access for refugees and offering them free high-quality coding classes.
Since the opening of the first ReDI School in Berlin in February 2016, more than 3,000 students from over forty nations have been trained specifically for the German job market.
ReDI School also has a pilot project to help refugee women, in particular, develop digital skills and network, and to promote self-employment.
In order to get access to free education, many Tibetan children are smuggled across the Himalayas to a reception camp in northern India to attend the exile school there. Returning to their homes is usually not an option due to sparse employment opportunities.
Eventually, these students have to decide between their own education or being close to their families with proper access to food. Sending their children to a local school would amount to an annual fee of 135 EUR per child – too much for most Tibetan families. With our donations to Nying Drod (“warm heart”), we try to ensure the education of Tibetan children and secure a lasting way out of poverty for them and their families.
In Germany, a single doctor is responsible for the medical care of 260 patients. A doctor in Tanzania has to care for more than 33,000 people, on average.
Two doctors from Germany decided to put all their heart and soul into a day clinic in north-western Tanzania which was founded back in 2008. They built up a facility that works very well by African standards and widely appreciated by the population. To help people in the long term, Gabriele and Ulrich invest in training medical and nursing staff as well as purchasing medical equipment and other necessities. Our donation ensures the further development of the Tanzanian day clinic.
All over the world, malaria, an infectious but treatable and preventable disease, threatens 3.2 billion people’s lives.
On top of that, other conditions and tropical diseases, such as pneumonia, diarrhea, dengue, malnutrition, force people into a daily battle for survival.
Our donation to Malaria Consortium will help improve the health condition of millions of vulnerable people by giving them financial access to preventive and diagnostic measures and treatment for some of the world’s most devastating diseases.
diversity is the only LGBT youth center in Bavaria and one of the few self-managed youth centers in Germany.
For many young lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people, it is the first point of contact and an important place to find support, meet friends and just express their inner self. Despite recent progress in society, empowerment is still enormously important for young LGBT to be able to stand up for themselves with self-confidence.
With our donation, we support a diverse range of LGBT*-focused services for young people in Germany.
In the coming months and years, we will continue working with an eye on sustainability and find new ways to support communities in need.
If you feel inspired, you can donate for one of the projects above, pick others that interest you more or just share this blog post with your network. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know when we add new projects.
This website is our digital embassy. It is a hub where we show what we do and what we have done. Conversation Design, Voice UX, Assistant Persona Design and many more – all our services, that will provide you with an intuitive entry into the voice industry can be found here. Simple, understandable and accessible at all times, that’s the most important thing. If it doesn’t move you, it won’t stay on your mind!
If you're reading this, chances are you care a lot about sustainability and climate change. So do we. We're still figuring out our global response to it. According to a recent VOX article, “Want to fight climate change effectively? Here’s where to donate your money.”,"Since 2000, carbon dioxide emissions have actually risen 12 percent."