Kindred Group working on voice betting
News on 16 Nov 2018
News on 16 Nov 2018
The innovation arm of the Kindred gambling group, Kindred Futures, has announced the launch of what it claims is a first-of-its-kind prototype for voice-driven betting.
The prototype was built in partnership with tech start-up Artificial Solutions and makes use of an improved Google Action to facilitate voice betting on six top European football leagues and competitions.
The company says it provides a problem-free betting experience and has the potential to redefine the way the users bet in the future.
Michael Franklin, Natural Language Lead at Kindred Futures, said Friday: “Google was a great foundation for us thanks to its years as a search engine, meaning it had a wealth of data on a broad range of topics that its speech recognition understood. But despite this, it still required many hours of tuning and training to build the recognition of nuanced betting terminology and phrases”.
Franklin explained that in 80 hours of extensive testing, more than 9,000 betting phrases were entered to find out which betting terms were understood and what were missed.
Mark Jones, head of presales at Artificial Solutions added: “Speech recognition has made massive leaps over the last few years, and it’s now reached that tipping point where it’s good enough to be used to explore the future of voice-activated betting. This pioneering conversational AI application means Kindred Futures is in the perfect position to exploit voice technology moving forward.”
Will Mace, head of Kindred Futures characterised the project as “an experiment to see whether the technology is at a level or standard to cope with the nuance of sports betting.”
“Delivering great experiences for our customers is at the forefront of what we do, making the best use of cutting-edge technology to deliver the products and services they want, or may require in the future,” he explained, noting that the product is currently in prototype mode, but once fully developed, will plug in to smart personal assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana.
