founder’s Q&A

Today, we’re excited to introduce you to our team and tell the story of how we developed textada, the innovative text annotation tool that is changing the way people work with text files. We will also be sharing more about our vision, our journey, and the future of text annotation.  

how did you come up with the idea for textada? 

Felix Hamborg: The founding team is composed of experts in computer science, data science, sociology, and political science. We have been working together for several years on various research projects, and we have been consistently frustrated with the lack of efficient and user-friendly text annotation tools. That’s when the idea for textada came up. We realized that we could use our interdisciplinary expertise to develop a tool that would make text annotation more efficient and state of the art AI solutions accessible to everyone.  

What challenges did you face while developing textada? 

Franziska Weeber: One of the biggest challenges was to balance the complexity of the AI technology with the user-friendliness of the tool. We wanted to make sure that textada was easy to use, especially for those without programming skills, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure that it was powerful enough to handle complex text annotation tasks. We also faced some challenges in terms of data privacy and security. One of our biggest priorities is to make sure that any user data is secure and protected when using our tool. By making sure that all GDPR laws and regulations are implemented and we have a strong login system, textada is secure to use right away. 

which do you consider the tool’s key features?

Moritz Bock: The key features of textada are Assisted Annotation, which automatically suggests annotations based on what the user coded manually, and its user-friendly interface. Also, the tool offers a few assistants for managing codes, keywords and documents. But we always have a lot of ideas on how to enhance the tool with new features, so make sure to stay up to date by signing up to our newsletter (laughs).

what are your plans for the future?

FH: We are constantly working on improving textada and adding new features. In the future, we want to expand textada’s capabilities to provide deeper data insights in terms of explorative analyses and result visualization. In addition to that, we are working on a model hub to make your annotation project transferable to other data without annotating any more texts. Oh and by the way, if you are missing a feature, you can always write us and we will see if it is possible to integrate in your project or the tool in general. Our aim is to make textada the go-to tool for text annotation, and we’ll continue working hard towards that goal.  

how do you see the future of text annotation in general?

FW: We believe that the future of text annotation is in AI supported tools. With the advances in AI technology, we see a lot of potential for automating and streamlining the text annotation process without sacrificing the knowledge of experts or losing your project’s individuality. We also think there’s a lot of possible applications for AI to gain deeper insights into text files and for making text annotation more accessible to a wider range of users. We believe that textada is at the frontier of this revolution and we’re excited to see where it will take all of us. 

how did you experience your startup journey? Any advice for your peers?

MB: We’ve been blessed to have such a great team from the start! Having a clear vision and mission for the project was one of the essential parts of our journey. Luckily, we knew what we wanted to achieve from the start – the first-of-its-kind AI Annotation Tool! This has helped us to stay motivated and focused, but also, to maintain our dedication to the creation process. One of the most important pieces of advice we can give is to not be afraid to ask for help. There are many different ways to attract partners and investors! Our shout out goes to the University of Konstanz for believing in our idea. The partnership with Kilometer1 and the eXist stipend grant have helped us immensely on our startup journey. We are still in the developing stage of our business, but we are confident that soon, all the hard work will pay off. So to everyone out there trying to get their project off the ground: be patient, stay on course, develop your product, test, improve and repeat. That is the way to success.