Kindred Group’s technology division, Kindred Futures, has launched a new voice betting prototype that has the potential to change the way that people bet.
The new technology has been developed in conjunction with start-up, Artificial Solutions, and has been designed to enable voice betting in markets relating to six leading European football competitions. The voice-driven betting app was created with the Teneo AI platform and also utilises Google’s well-known speech recognition product.
Speaking about the new technology, the natural language lead at Kindred Futures, Michael Franklin, said that the app had taken considerable effort to develop:
Over 80 hours of extensive testing, inputting more than 9,000 betting phrases, was required to understand the capability of the Google speech recognition: what betting terms were understood and what were missed.”
Massive leaps
Mark Jones of Artificial Solutions said that there had been ‘massive leaps’ in the progress of speech recognition technology over the last few years, and that it had reached the point where it was possible to utilise in such applications as voice-activated betting.
The app was originally created as a Google Action, but the Teneo technology that underlies it is described as ‘fully agnostic’, which means that it can be plugged into a range of existing smart assistant apps, including Alexa, Siri and Cortana.
The project to develop the voice-betting app was carried out to test whether the technology could cope with the particular demands and nuances of sports betting. It is currently at a prototype stage so is not yet available for customers, but if it eventually reaches the sports betting industry, it is likely to attract plenty of imitators, and voice-activated betting could become the next big thing in the gambling industry over the coming years.
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