Autor: Leonardo Renn

I started working this Monday and arrived just in time to participate in a weekly meeting of the entire company where I was introduced to the staff followed by their regular topics. The company I am working for is called Speechstorm, which is developing their own stand alone programs providing a telephone based interactive communication system for customers all around the world. The idea behind this software is to allow big companies to handle a massive amount of calls whether they are just for the purpose of receiving informations such as account balance or directing them to an agent who will then help the customer based on their needs. To make those calls more time efficient and effective the agent is given a list of useful informations directly displayed on his monitor while talking to the customer on the phone. Those informations are collected by the software either by the inputs a caller made by pressing numbers on the keyboard (DMTF recognition) or by the voice recognition engine which is running in the background which is totally optional.

Although many similar programs are already in use, Speechstorm is setting new standards when it comes to flexibility combined with easy to configure software. Customers are able to set up Speechstorm dependend on their needs and can also decided whether they want to use text to speech as the output or upload their prompts on their own.

To really get into the programming itself I am currently reading through a lot of repositories to get a better understanding how the frameworks are working. The code itself is a combination of javascript with a SQL Database in the background.
I am really satisfied about my placement and couldn’t be happier in this type of environment with a small and young team in the background willing to help me wherever they can.

While exploring every corner of Belfast talking to other people is obviously a must do which turned out to be much better than expected. Most people just confront us because they heard a word of german and somehow become really interested finding out what we are doing so far away from home. This is often the start of a long lasting but still entertaining conversation which already paid out a couple of times. Not only are the people incredibly nice but you can really feel that they want to know your story and don´t have any bad intentions on their mind.

We met a really friendly lady called Jane who worked at the International House and was responsible for some of the social activities in the afternoon. One of the best experiences I had in the first week was our lesson in bodhran which is a traditional irish instrument really similar to a tamburine. Jane told us to come to one of the most famous pubs in belfast the „diry onion“ where we also met some other folks from the International House and started our lesson in bodhran drumming.
It was a lot of fun and after a while people even started dancing around us which made it even better. After some drinks and around 20 songs later we started our trip back to the apartment.

The first couple of days passed by and I am more and more adapting to my environment which took some time especially if you are used to really high german food standards and cheap prices. Here in Northern Ireland the clocks really tick differently, not only are the people really unique but there is something about Belfast which is completely new to me. But one thing after another:

We had to call the police after just one day being here because there were some random strangers we could not identify who were throwing stones at the window and managed to break one. After talking to the cops on the phone we could hear them arriving just a couple of minutes later. We had a really informative chat with them in which they told us, that this would be their 600th something case just today (and it was still the early afternoon). This truly was an odd way of greeting your new neighbours and of course the the police couldn’t do anything about it so we just called our landlord and our agency telling them about the situation. Our landlord told us that he will send somebody to fix it and we went on spending some good times around the city and forgetting about the incident.

Arriving at Dublin the capital of Ireland already proofed that this really is a cloudy country but still I was not going to judge this country by its nasty weather but more by its people and lifestyle. After a bus trip which already gave us some good impressions what life looks like on the countryside and divided our group into their different headings a small part of the AFIB after around 6 hours finally arrived at Belfast.

We were picked up by our agency Intern Europe and met our landlord a couple of cab minutes later who showed us around the flats we‘ll be living in for the next two months. With a smile on everyones faces we had our first very good impression about how life could be throughout our internship.

Now a couple of days later I can say that this changed much faster than expected…