Kindred Futures, the innovation arm of Kindred Group, today launches a pioneering voice betting prototype to challenge the way consumers may bet in the near future.
Launched in partnership with tech start-up Artificial Solutions, the Google Action has been developed to facilitate voice betting on six top European football leagues & competitions, creating a seamless betting experience that could redefine the way the users bet in the future. Kindred's new voice driven betting app was developed using the Teneo conversational AI platform and utilizes Google's speech recognition services.
“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” says Michael Franklin, Natural Language Lead at Kindred Futures.
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. Using powerful machine learning, this database could be used to tune the solution and ensure it understands user inputs.
Mark Jones, Head of Presales at Artificial Solutions said: “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 describes the project as “an experiment to see whether the technology was at a level or standard to cope with the nuance of sports betting.” He continues: “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.”
The product is currently in prototype stage and not yet available to customers. Initially created as a Google Action, the underlying Teneo technology is fully agnostic, meaning it can plug-in to Alexa, Siri, Cortana and whichever smart assistant comes next.
To find out more about Kindred Futures, visit http://www.kindredgroup.com/kindred-futures
For more information:
Please email Nina Kadhaya: nina.kadhaya@karmarama.com or call 020 3301 2261
Please email Will Mace: will.mace@kindredgroup.com or call 07736 276 221
About Kindred Futures
Kindred Futures is Kindred Group PLC’s innovation arm which launched in 2016 to connect with startups and early stage businesses. Acting as a value-adding partner for startups, Kindred Futures aims to form mutually beneficial partnerships to explore strategically interesting opportunities arising from technological developments or customer trends. Kindred Futures is committed to seeking out the most interesting companies and entrepreneurs to transform the future of gambling. For more information please visit www.kindredfutures.com
About Kindred Group
Kindred Group is one of the world’s leading online gambling operators with business across Europe and Australia, offering over 21 million customers across 11 brands a great form of entertainment in a safe, fair and sustainable environment. The company, which employs about 1,400 people, is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm Large Cap and is a founding member of the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) and founding member of ESSA (sports betting integrity). Kindred Group is audited and certified by eCOGRA for compliance with the 2014 EU Recommendation on Consumer Protection and Responsible Gambling (2014/478/EU). Read more on www.kindredgroup.com.
About Artificial Solutions
Artificial Solutions® is the leading specialist in enterprise-strength Conversational AI, a form of Artificial Intelligence that allows people to communicate with applications, websites and devices in everyday, humanlike natural language via voice, text, touch or gesture input.
Designed for the global enterprise, the company’s advanced conversational AI platform, Teneo®, allows business users and developers to collaborate on creating sophisticated, highly intelligent applications that run across 35 languages, multiple platforms and channels in record time. The ability to analyze and make use of the enormous quantities of conversational data is fully integrated within Teneo, delivering unprecedented levels of insight that reveal what customers are truly thinking.
Artificial Solutions’ conversational AI technology makes it easy to implement a wide range of natural language applications such as virtual assistants, chatbots, speech-based conversational UIs for smart devices and more. It is already used daily by millions of people across hundreds of private and public sector deployments worldwide. For more information visit www.artificial-solutions.com