Candidate 1 - Augmented reality

Augmented reality (AR) is mostly used for entertainment purposes in the smart-device industry and not utilized for productivity. It is more of a gimmick or “nice feature thing” (appendix 21.5), and not yet mature in this market. Early adopters are investigating and trying to utilize the innovation for productivity and mass media hypes the innovation and shows growing interest. Augmented reality is therefore positioned in the area of peak of inflated expectations.

88 Ranking factors:

Scale of benefit: Qwiki could potentially benefit by incorporating augmented reality in the QM app enhancing user content and linking to topical searches (QR). Augmented reality and its areas of applications is still not properly understood in the smart-device market. At the moment, augmented reality is primarily being applied to the smart-devices camera function to add computer-generated elements, and combined with the devices’ GPS positioning to look up information. The actual beneficial value towards customer satisfaction would be rather low.

Current maturity: The maturity of AR is in between the emerging and adolescence stage.

Low time to value: The current to time value for augmented reality to mature into the plateau of productivity is a tough estimate to make. For the time being none of the ‘big players’ in the app industry have shown any commercial interest in the innovation. The time to value is thus moving slowly ahead, and currently low.

Risks: In regard to the four value gap risks described in the theory section, the adoption of augmented reality would pose a risks associated with integration and performance i.e. a large risk is associated with integrated into the QM since AR performance is low, unreliable, and slow. Qwiki has not shown any signs or interest in this innovation yet, so understanding and adopting the innovation within a reasonable time frame is not very likely making the risks moderate to high.

Low costs: Understanding and adopting the innovation would require a lot of time and resources making the costs moderate.

From our estimations we can show how the adoption of this candidate would have moderate cost and risk associated with the adoption, but the returns in benefit and low time to value are not contributing in a sense that would outweigh the costs and risks.

Figure 16 - Ranking candidate 1 - Augmented reality

89 13.3.2 Candidate 2 - Speech recognition

Newer smart-devices currently have speech recognition features implemented. With the release of iPhone4S and “Siri” (Apples speech recognition system) a lot of hype was generated (appendix 21.4).

Not long after, the release negative hype started to cloud the Siri experiences as it was perceived a funny gimmick to ask silly questions, but the command features had a lot of errors and strong accents made it virtually impossible to use. It is still not functioning very accurately and receives a lot of negative hype;

it is therefore positioned in bottom of through of disillusionment.

Ranking factors:

Scale of benefit: Qwiki could maybe benefit a little with speech recognition in their QM solution, e.g.

by voice-activating the creation of a qwiki and editing the result. But it would also introduce a lot of complexity since rearranging content through natural language would require defining complex commands that the user would need to learn and remember. If Qwiki still offered the QR iPad app, speech recognition could greatly benefit this solution, as a speech-to-text and execution function would minimize effort needed to conduct a QR search. With their current offerings speech recognition would not benefit Qwiki very much just like augmented reality.

Current maturity: Speech recognition in the smart-device market is at the stage of through of disillusionment but gaining rapid momentum and starting to mature. When Apple released Siri it made a huge impact on speech recognition for smart-device as it could do a variety of things like make calls, change schedules, find stocks, write text messengers etc. (Apple, 2013, A). Yet, until stability, reliability, and better translation of natural language into commands is more mature, speech recognition will not reach the plateau of productivity.

Low time to value: The value of speech recognition will first become exciting when the translation of natural language and execution of voice commands works properly, until then it is a source of frustration and potentially harmful if the translation fails and wrong commands are executed. The time to value is in the moderate area.

Risks: Adopting speech recognition would trigger the risk of performance issue. The innovation is not very reliable and can be harmful in many ways if the innovation gets “lost in translation”. Qwiki could be risking customer value if the adoption introduces performance issues; no one likes unreliable programs. Imagining a situation where a user has generate a very personal Qwiki which only a few people are allowed to see, and a voice activated command for e.g. “share with xyz” is translated to “post on Facebook”. That would not be a good scenario, and could cannibalize the user-base.

90 Low costs: Integrating an interface between e.g. QM and Siri would not be difficult to achieve, this would be done through Siri API. Using this feature causes Qwiki to become dependent on Apple to produce a solid and reliable product. Developing a new solution from scratch would be expensive, but Qwiki would have full control over features and performance. This solution would probably be the best, and costs would be high.

Adopting speech recognition would not generate much value to Qwiki with their current offerings and platforms, risks and costs would be high, and the overall maturity of the innovation is still very low.