Kindred Futures Challenges Voice Driven Betting

Business News

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.

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