Introduction
CITYlingo is an application designed for iPhone and Android users who like to travel or study abroad. The app will consist of various cities that are classic tourist destinations: Paris, Bangkok, Istanbul, and many more. It provides the language of each city from basic to advanced phrases and sentences, enabling tourists to easily communicate while navigating around the city. This app exists to encourage individuals to learn different languages, thus allowing individuals to immerse themselves into the language and culture each city has to offer. As an ideal application, it will deliver the following services:
- A built-in camera scanner – scanning menus, leaflets etc. into the language you prefer.
- Money tracker - this will help individuals especially students when they go abroad to be able to keep track of their spending. They can note down an estimate expenditure for each day and be efficient with their money.
- An installation of speech recognition will help tourists to communicate with the locals.
- The app will offer recommendations of accommodations/hotels, libraries, food places and activities users can go to, along with the price range beside it.
- It will also provide excursion routes that will be cost-efficient for users (public transport, mini cab services or by foot).
The growth of tourism and students abroad have drastically risen over the past few years. A large amount of people are now spending their holidays in a foreign country or studying overseas. In 2018, 71.7 million visits abroad were made by UK residents alone[1] and according to Statista, approximately 518,645 number of students are studying abroad in the academic year of 2017/18 (Figure1)[2]. Given the language barrier, tourists/students are likely to struggle or face problems in a foreign country. This application will cater the needs of this target group by using the services the app has to offer.
Potential Publishers
Macmillan Education is a global publishing company that is influential around the globe. The company provides many educational features particularly a wide range of languages. This supports individuals, from children to adults to learn and excel in foreign languages at basic and high educational levels. Moreover, as this is a prominent publishing company, it attracts others due to it being successful and having produced and published many popular audio books. Macmillan have been developing digital tools to support individuals with learning languages. They have representatives and teachers in 'over 120 countries'[3] working together to provide students assistance. Therefore, this publisher will be able to support in creating this app as they will be promoting and encouraging others to learn and excel at new languages.
Audible is a widely used application by a multitude of people, being compatible with smartphones it allows individuals to access it at their fingertips. Audible is also incredibly successful and has produced best-selling audio books both available to children and adults. By appealing to a wider audience, Audible increases in ability to support individuals in learning different languages by providing the accurate pronunciation and authenticity. Therefore, this will be beneficial in producing the app as it will support the individual's learning and the speech recognition.
Business Model
The freemium business model is frequently used to monetize phone apps. In order to generate a revenue from an app, it must be distributed for free. Creating the app for free allows a greater user base, the more users, the more who are willing to pay for the extra purchases.4 Like Duolingo, CITYlingo will be a free app, once downloaded, all services will be available. While using the app, adverts will be played in between each phrases/sentences to generate more income. To increase the quality of the app's services, users have the option to immerse themselves in multiple languages for a purchase price of £6.99. They would have to create an account on the Macmillan Education website to get full access to the package. The risk of pricing CITYlingo at £6.99 may lead to customers especially students to purchase apps that are fully free from existing competitors.
STRENGTHS
- Unlike Google Translate (produces translations that have grammatical errors), CITYlingo will have an accurate database of languages from sources, such as books and academics.
- As this app requires internet data, individuals can download phrases and have their recording saved beforehand to use when required.
- Location services will be automatically connected to the app.
WEAKNESSES
- CITYlingo will need internet access to load, otherwise it will be useless for the users to operate while navigating through the city - users may face difficulty accessing routes for their journey if there is an unexpected road closure due to accidents or road works that may have not been highlighted before.
- The speech recognition feature may not always pronounce phrases accurately which can create confusion when trying to translate or engage in conversations with others.
- Some individuals may prefer group tours or having a guide to direct them around rather than choosing to independently navigate around a foreign city specially tourists who are travelling as a family or in larger groups may prefer to have someone showing them around in comparison to individuals who on a solo trip.
4 Lui, Charles Zhechao, Au, Yoris A. & Choi, Hoon Seok, 'Effects of Freemium Strategy in the Mobile App
Market: An Empirical Study of Google Play', Journal of Management Information Systems, 31.3, (2015), 326 354 (p. 333-334), in
Competition
- Competition wise, an app that may have similarities to CITYlingo, is Duolingo as both apps offer language learning services. However, CITYlingo broadly stands out as it offers multiple features (money tracker and built in camera scanner which Duolingo does not provide.)
- If we look at rivals for publishers such as Audible, it can be seen that there is not a very competitive market due to Audible being a dominant audio publishing app.
Conclusion
Overall, CITYlingo will provide educational support in the form of a technological app, offering individuals with a selection of languages to choose from. Most importantly they will be able to learn and communicate with others in different cities which not only encourages individuals to learn a new language, it also helps them to develop and advance in that language.
A reason why CITYlingo may be successful is due to the wide audience it is compatible with. Adaptable for all ages (children to adults), it provides users with the option to begin each language at a basic and advanced level.
Furthermore, this app has a built-in camera which scans the language on documents and identifies the language then translates it. This feature will appeal to users as it assists them to navigate in comfort and independently. However, the strongest asset of this app would be its speech recognition and audio. The feature listens to the language whilst translating it into the preferred language. The user can generate a response through the app and effectively communicate with the individual.
References
Document cover photo: UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS, Travel Alerts,
Image of CITYlingo: Created on PowerPoint
Figure 1: Statista, Number of students studying abroad for a degree from English higher education (HE) providers in 2017/18, by type of degree and location* (2019)
Figure 2: RUTGERS, Canva, Macmillain Learning <https://canvas.rutgers.edu/externalapps/macmillan-learning/> [accessed 12 November 2019]
Figure 3: QRIUS, Amazon India finally debuts Audible in India with about 2,00,000 titles: All you need to know (2018) <https://qrius.com/audible-in-india/> [accessed 14 November 2019]
Lui, Charles Zhechao, Au, Yoris A. & Choi, Hoon Seok, 'Effects of Freemium Strategy in the
Mobile App Market: An Empirical Study of Google Play', Journal of Management Information Systems, 31.3, (2015), 326 - 354 (p. 333-334), in
Macmillan Education, LANGUAGE LEARNING (2016)
Office for National Statistics, Travel trends: 2018 (2019) Melita Koletnik Korošec, 'Applicability and Challenges of Using Machine Translation in Translator Training', ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 8.2, (2011), 7 - 18, in [1] Office for National Statistics, Travel trends: 2018 (2019)
[2] Statista, Number of students studying abroad for a degree from English higher education (HE) providers in 2017/18, by type of degree and location* (2019)
[3] Macmillan Education, LANGUAGE LEARNING (2016)
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