At a Glance:
Project Metrics
| Customer: | German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB in cooperation with the State Sports Federation of North Rhine-Westphalia) |
| Period: | October 2024 - December 1, 2024 |
| Budget: | Six-figure |
| Team: | 4 AI Specialists, UI/UX Designer, Frontend/Backend Developers |
| Industry: | Public Sector, Sports Associations |
| Area of Application: | Self-Service and Knowledge Management in Sports |
Technologies
Background
With the increasing digitalization of organized sports, associations and clubs face the challenge of making information accessible in a way that allows it to be found quickly, independently, and around the clock. The digital assistant of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) – developed by Helm & Walter IT-Solutions – is a milestone in this development.
The DOSB's digital assistant demonstrates how modern AI technologies based on Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and multilingual speech recognition can be transformed into practical applications that create real value: a fact-based and secure information tool for everyone involved in German sports.
DOSB Customer Profile
The German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) is the umbrella organization of German sports with 101 member organizations, over 27 million memberships, and approximately 87,000 sports clubs. It represents the interests of competitive, recreational, and health sports and promotes digital transformation in sports, including through the SPORTDEUTSCHLAND Digital initiative.
The "Digital Assistant" project was supported within the framework of the "ReStart – Sport bewegt Deutschland" funding program by the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI). We at Helm & Walter had the privilege of implementing this pilot project based on our expertise in AI and web environments.
Project Description
The goal of the project was to develop an AI-powered chatbot – the so-called Digital Assistant – to answer everyday questions about club organization, volunteering, and funding opportunities. The digital assistant was integrated into the pilot project vibss.de (Association Information, Consulting, and Training System of the LSB NRW) and is designed as a scalable tool that will also be available to other state sports federations in the future.
The system combines modern language processing with structured knowledge retrieval via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This innovative technology reduces "hallucinations" (a convincingly formulated AI result that is not justified by training data and may be objectively incorrect) through the verifiability of answers via attached source citations. Thanks to voice and text input in five languages (German, English, Turkish, Russian, Arabic), the assistant is low-barrier and accessible to a broad target audience.
Challenges: Olympic Hurdle Race
A project of this magnitude combines technological, organizational, and communication challenges:
Strict Time Management:
The digital assistant had to be developed, tested, and finalized in just a few weeks. Projects of this nature often experience delays because customer requirements and technical possibilities are in tension, misunderstandings occur, or force majeure problems arise. We implemented this project for the DOSB to their complete satisfaction despite the tight schedule.
Data Currency and Factual Basis:
Our team of AI specialists consistently relied on the innovative RAG technology approach, enabling the chatbot to retrieve current information from verified sources such as vibss.de and lsb.nrw and process it in real-time. The result was consistently source-backed and therefore more reliable answers.
Reliable Answers:
The chatbot uses a so-called "LLM-as-a-Judge" method, which automatically checks answers for plausibility and linguistic appropriateness. This represents an important step in avoiding hallucinations and inappropriate language choices.
Multilingualism & Accessibility:
In the public sector, speech-to-text and text-to-speech functions offer great innovation and improvement potential. Together with assistive technologies and the adjustability of contrast and font sizes, these functions ensure an inclusive user experience.
Design & User-Friendliness:
An intuitive popup interface with customizable design integrates seamlessly into the VIBSS website. Simple and intuitive operation as well as transparency were the focus – including GDPR and AI regulation compliance.
Extensive Database:
The digital assistant uses a knowledge base of over 6,000 PDF documents and 80,000 data points. For the AI to provide good answers, the data must be complete and correctly structured. Many files contained ambiguous or missing metadata, such as title or creation date, which had to be cleaned. Diagrams, tables, and graphics are also difficult to interpret by machine and required special procedures. Through clean preprocessing and intelligent extraction, a reliable, high-performance knowledge repository was created as the foundation for precise answers.
The Product: The Digital Assistant
The slider below shows various usage scenarios. The accessible, multilingual AI chatbot answers anytime, quickly and reliably to various questions about sports, but also recognizes contextually inappropriate questions. To further support volunteers, the digital assistant formulates suitable follow-up questions.
Slide 1 of 5
Diverse Support Offerings: The AI assistant presents its comprehensive capabilities with structured answers on club management, sports information, and integration programs.
Use arrow keys to navigate slides, Home and End keys to go to first or last slide.
Try the chatbot on vibss.de
Result: Gold Medal for Helm & Walter
With the digital assistant, we set the starting signal for AI-based and digital self-service in organized sports in Germany. The DOSB and LSB NRW reported positive feedback from the portal's user base shortly after the launch on vibss.de in February 2025. Our solution, which is available 24/7, accessible, multilingual, and GDPR-compliant, led to a noticeable reduction in service requests and relief for the LSB NRW's specialist departments.
The DOSB published the chatbot in its own post on LinkedIn with over 26,000 followers reached – and thanked Helm & Walter for the "competent and timely implementation."
Chat button with user notification at the bottom left on vibss.de
Opened chat window with greeting and notice texts on vibss.de
Chat in maximized view on vibss.de
What the DOSB Says
Bernd Helm and his team took on the challenge of developing a custom chatbot for volunteers in club management under time pressure, thus facilitating volunteer work for them. By the end of the project, not only was the project completed, but smaller additions were also successfully implemented. I can only thank them for their punctual and independent way of working.
Miriam Seib, ReStart Program Manager
Top Performances of Our Team
Bernd Helm
I was responsible for the development and technical leadership of the DOSB chatbot project. Based on the in-house HW-RAG library, I implemented a customized RAG pipeline (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) that was precisely tailored to the specific requirements of the DOSB. Through systematic evaluation of user feedback, I continuously optimized system performance and achieved convincing answer quality. Additionally, I took over strategic project planning and coordination of all development activities, ensuring on-time project delivery.
Tobias Friedrich
My responsibility lay in integrating a website crawler into the existing chatbot infrastructure. This component enables the system to automatically capture content directly from websites and linked PDF documents and make them available as knowledge sources for the chatbot. Through this extension, the chatbot's database was significantly enlarged and the timeliness of information was significantly improved, as content can now be obtained directly and up-to-date from web presences.
Robert Schwabe
I was responsible for designing a user interface for the DOSB chatbot in close coordination with the client. I developed high-fidelity prototypes to iteratively test and evaluate various design variants and interaction concepts. I placed special emphasis on compliance with the LSB NRW's CI guidelines for use on VIBBS.de as well as on an accessibility concept in accordance with the Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG) and WCAG 2. The final design supports both a compact overlay mode and a responsive full-screen mode for desktop and mobile devices.
Ronny Herzog
I was responsible for the technical implementation of the DOSB chatbot on the frontend. I implemented the design concept and integrated the provided API for backend configuration as well as the multilingual function. A central focus of my work was implementing my colleague's accessibility concept in accordance with BFSG and WCAG 2. Additionally, I developed a flexible, variable integration solution for customer websites. The chatbot can be implemented responsively and automatically adapts to different screen sizes and display modes.
Outlook: After the Race Comes the Next Race
After successful project completion in December 2024, the digital assistant is now being rolled out nationwide. The DOSB will also use the assistant on its own website and licenses the solution as a white-label system to additional state sports federations and associations. Our specialist team at Helm & Walter is already working on the rollout for several follow-up customers and is accompanying this process with technical further development, hosting, and consulting.
Our conclusion: The project underscores our mission to deploy artificial intelligence where it creates real value.
With saxony.ai, we offer not only IT services but also our own products as AI solutions. The use cases for our chatbot solutions alone range from self-service for websites to AI as a knowledge manager or copilot for data analysis. But AI is more than just chatbots! We offer digital twins, predictive maintenance, and other smart solutions. Feel free to contact us if you have questions.
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