Kindred develops AI betting voice assistant solution

Kindred’s innovation arm, Kindred Futures, has developed a voice-powered betting experience to be used across Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana devices.

The AI-powered product has been produced in partnership with natural language solutions software company Artificial Solutions and allows punters to place wagers through a “conversational AI application”

Mark Jones, head of presales at Artificial Solutions, said: “We had to train the platform to only offer bets that are available at that time to produce a seamless experience for the user.

“Kindred has developed this true conversational AI application and they’re in the position to exploit this technology as it moves forward,” Jones added.

The offering is currently in prototype stage and not available to customers.

Head of Kindred Futures, Will Mace, said speech recognition had proved a challenge during the process, as betting has its own unique slang.

For example a command to “place a tenner” was interpreted by the device as ”play Santana”.

Kindred has been working on forms of voice-activated betting since 2016, but moved away from the original Siri-powered Unibet product after a lack of response from users.

Kindred’s open innovation manager, Michael Franklin, told EGR Intel: “We’ve looked at voice technologies in the past two years but back then it was probably too nascent. I think a prototype was developed and not taken much further.”

Up to now firms, including Paddy Power and Sky Betting & Gaming, have focused on using voice technology to offer punters exclusive content rather than to actually place bets.

Kindred previously partnered with Artificial Solutions on a Facebook Messenger chatbot solution, launched during the 2018 World Cup.