20 years of the Hype Cycle

In the Technology Trigger stage, early proofs of concept trigger significant publicity, but there are often no useable products and no obvious commercial applications. The Peak of Inflated Expectations sees some success stories, as well as many failures. This is followed by the Trough of Disillusionment, where interest wanes as implementations fail to meet expectations. Then comes the Slope of Enlightenment, where the benefits of a particular technology become more widely understood and where second and third generation products appear. Finally, at the Plateau of Productivity, mainstream adoption begins. The longest running of the Hype Cycles looks at Emerging Technologies and Gartner has just published the 2014 edition. There are many technologies positioned on the curve, ranging from bioacoustic sensing and quantum computing to consumer telematics and speech recognition. Many of these will require decades to reach the mainstream, if indeed they do. Speech recognition, the subject of a recent New Electronics cover story, appears in various forms at various points on the curve. For example, speech to speech translation is seen to be at the technology trigger phase, with at least five years needed for it to come to market successfully. Natural language questioning is at the peak of inflated expectations, while 'plain old' speech recognition is approaching the plateau of productivity, with mainstream adoption in less than two years. One technology placed firmly at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment is virtual reality (VR); Gartner says this is at least five years away from broad acceptance. Two decades ago, VR was 'the best thing since sliced bread'. If you went to an exhibition, it was hard to avoid being asked to don the goggles; it would be the way of the future. Yet VR remains as far from broad application today as it did then and illustrates quite nicely the Hype Cycle concept.