How onilo.de is revolutionizing EdTech production and scaling educational excellence with artificial intelligence
In digital education, quality is the key to success. Onilo, an established medium-sized company in the EdTech sector, faced the challenge of scaling the production of its popular digital content without compromising on high pedagogical and creative standards.
By partnering with EDIH Hamburg as part of a Joint Proof of Concept (JPoC), Onilo was able to demonstrate how the integration of AI technologies optimizes internal workflows and drastically reduces manual effort. The result: increased competitiveness and more efficient, cost-effective growth.
The project at a glance
- Customer type: SME (medium-sized business)
- Sector: EdTech / Digital education
- Focus: Process optimization through generative AI
- Partner: onilo.de
Challenges
Onilo.de is known for its high-quality “board stories” – animated stories that specifically promote the language and reading skills of children in elementary school, kindergartens and libraries. However, the magic of the stories used to require an enormous amount of manual effort.
The production of these animations was extremely time-consuming. Every single step – from image segmentation to animation and voice generation – required a lot of manual intervention. These repetitive tasks tied up valuable resources and limited the team’s ability to focus on the heart of their work: the creative and educational design of new stories.
The solution: the path to AI-supported production
The aim of the JPoC with EDIH Hamburg was to break through this bottleneck. Together, they investigated where AI assistants could usefully support or even automate the production workflow.
The innovation: a modular AI toolbox At the heart of the collaboration was the development of a prototype for an easily expandable AI toolbox. This integrates various AI models to cover the most important phases of media production:
- Speech generation: Automated dubbing in the highest quality (text → speech).
- Image creation & segmentation: Acceleration of graphic preparation (text → image or text, image → image).
- Animation: AI-supported movement for lively stories (text, image → video).
Thanks to EDIH Hamburg’s low barriers to entry, Onilo was able to safely experiment with new technologies and validate prototypes before making large investments. This collaboration is a best-practice example of how regional innovation centers can help SMEs successfully make the leap from traditional processes to an AI-powered future.
