by Roman Egger

Have you ever heard of Gaia-X? No, it is an ambitious project supported by the European Union with the goal of creating an open, secure, and interoperable platform for cloud services and data infrastructure in Europe. It is supported by a consortium of companies and organizations from various industries across Europe and is part of the EU’s strategy to promote digitalization in Europe. The platform aims to enable users to access and connect services and data from different providers, creating new business opportunities and strengthening the competitiveness of the European economy.

So, what does this have to do with the tourism industry?

The tourism industry is a significant contributor to the European economy, employing millions of people. In recent years, however, the industry has undergone significant changes due to technological advancements and digitalization, making it increasingly important for businesses to adapt and use new technologies to stay competitive.

This is where Gaia-X comes in. By leveraging the capabilities of Gaia-X, businesses in the tourism industry can connect and use data from different providers to create personalized offers for tourists. For example, by linking data from airlines, hotels, and other service providers, businesses can offer customized travel routes and packages tailored to the needs and preferences of tourists.

In addition to this, businesses in the tourism industry can also benefit from the security and interoperability of Gaia-X. By using Gaia-X, they can ensure that their data is processed securely and can be easily connected to other services and providers, improving the efficiency and performance of their businesses.

Overall, Gaia-X offers a unique opportunity for businesses in the tourism industry to adapt and use new technologies to stay competitive and create new business opportunities. It is important for businesses in this industry to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Gaia-X and get involved in the project to reap the benefits

by Roman Egger

Have you heard about WHISPER, the OpenAI language model? If not, you’re in for a treat! I recently tried out WHISPER for myself and was blown away by its capabilities. WHISPER is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It was trained on a massive dataset and trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data. You can choose between the small, basic and large model.

I was particularly impressed with the speech recognition of the large model, which, however, takes looooong if you don´t run it on a GPU until you receive the output. As input, I used an expert interview I recently gave for a PhD student. I recognized everything correctly, even a mixture between German and Englisch at the beginning of the interview – amazing! So I think of setting up Whisper to be used for my students. Whenever they do qualitative studies, it can be used for transcription.

Overall, I highly recommend giving WHISPER a try if you have the opportunity. It´s super easy to use (but I struggled with ffmpeg, which you also need to install).

import whisper
model = whisper.load_model(“base”)options = whisper.DecodingOptions(fp16=False)
result = model.transcribe(“test.mp3”)
print(result[“text”])