Qwiki - First impressions? | Hacker News Reader

Qwiki - First impressions?

4 pointsnirajr9 comments

Just got my Qwiki account, and played around with it for 30 mins.

First impressions: - Does not create qwikis on the fly. Has a whole load of stuff created with it which it serves to viewers. Thats the logical thing to do of course.

- Essentially, just reads out the first 3-4 paragraphs from the wikipedia page. Again logical as there's a very little chance that what you'd want to know about on Qwiki (on instinct) does not have a wikipedia page already. On instinct, all I tried looking for was personalities, companies and algorithms, and I got good quality clean output for all. Its when I wanted to stress test it was when I tried a query like "How to avoid cancer". Of course thats not a Qwiki-like topic.

Overall a great product. Makes me think - its very common sense: pick up the wikipedia page, annotate it with images and videos wherever there is a relevant context, store everything in the backend, and serve when requested.

I think its going to be huge. What do you think.

Its a nice-to-have and in a very competitive market (information retrieval). it goes up against the following competitors.

a. reading Wikipedia b. searching on Google c. asking questions on social networks / forums

Its flashy and attractive but doesn't make the task more efficient and or grant obvious benefits. Might have a market in Education or Product showcase vertical but as a web consumer play? not going to be huge IMHO.

Education can be huge. It IS huge.

I agree but they are pitching it to the consumer web not educational institutions.

We're still some way off from seeing who they are pitching it to. Its more a question of having your ears to the ground and trying to understand who this can be sold to. I think that applies for any business. I am sure they'll pitch it to whoever it makes the most sense to pitch to.

As strictly an end user the computer voice annoys the crap out of me and makes me hate it. The concept is great but due to this one vice, I will never use it. It seriously makes me feel insane.

Would agree to that, but would still use it.

It was nice for a beta launch. But they have long way to go before they can be of any practical use.

But it's great for kids... or is it? :P

But a really nice start. Interesting things are coming up in Content Industry. Nice!

I can sight-read Wikipedia faster than the voice can read to me, so that's not adding anything.

The slideshow often seems like a random mish-mash of related images and graphs, with animating flourishes that distract rather than adding information.

I thought clicking them might branch off or accelerate the voice in that topical direction; instead in most cases it's just a zoomed modal lightbox that stops the voice and offers other outlinks. Some of the infographics are wrong where Wikipedia is right; for example its report of the area of the city of Palo Alto is off by a factor of 100. If the same information were just inline, I could read/scan them faster. As it is, rewinding is harder than the same info provided in a scrolling view.

I suppose if Wikipedia has 'too many words', or if you were otherwise of limited literacy, Qwiki might be valuable. I was underwhelmed, but then again I prefer the wordiness of the NYTimes or WSJ to cable TV news, most days.

Perhaps having it be a dashboard for other info sources -- as in the founder's 'alarm clock'/wake-routine scenario at TCDisrupt -- could provide some other value... but perhaps not more than other tech that can read a block of text stitched together from many sources.

I looked at Metallica and Dylan, and looking at the Qwiki was a very enjoyable experience - way more juicier than reading. It could have gone even further if it played some tracks in the background :)

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