Q&A: Rakesh Chablani, digital managing director at Betfred

Rakesh Chablani, digital managing director at Betfred, on the bookmaker’s decision to launch a voice-activated mobile app specifically for Euro 2016

We wanted to develop an intuitive app and try to effectively differentiate based on the standard betting applications that are out on the market. Voice recognition has come a long way in recent years with the development of Siri and Cortana, so we thought there would be a viable solution to implement a betting application that is solely focused on voice recognition.

The native app can be downloaded from the iOS or Android store and effectively does three things. It recognises the user dialogue, understands it and acts accordingly based on those instructions. It’s a complex process that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve two or three years ago in terms of its accuracy.

The app allows users to bet on and request odds for all the main Euro 2016 markets. Alongside the voice-activation feature are peripheries that we’ve created to give the user the maximum experience. There’s live streaming of commentary and also live tickers. The reason we’ve done this as a Euro 2016 product only was to treat this as a minimum viable product. We thought it would be a great opportunity to get something for an event that really drives the recreational and super users together.

In order to really encapsulate the Euro 2016 market, we needed a standout personality that really resonates with the English demographic. Former England footballer Stuart Pearce is someone that is recognisable, especially with his previous penalty sagas, and we felt that he was fit for purpose and fits the brand. We are looking into how we can adopt him for other initiatives in the future.

Our overarching marketing strategy is to showcase an innovative product designed to make betting easier for everyone. With this in mind, we chose to abandon our traditional methods of advertising, and adopted a digitally-led campaign fronted by Pearce.

The app was developed by our in-house innovation team. Our young individuals came up with the idea. We have an innovation strategy that ensures we are listening to our staff and so we funded the programme. We’re able to focus entirely on finding new and interesting technologies, and that team is able to focus on what’s working in parallel sectors, and then looking into how they can exploit that technology into our market place to meet the demands of our target demographic.

The main challenge with this feature is to ensure what the user says is recognised all the time. We’ve had people speaking in a Scottish accent or a southern accent, and the app works well in recognising the different dialects. It also recognises a lot of the betting jargons, such as a “pony on X” or a “monkey on Y”.

But it’s going to be hard because jargon changes, we’re just making sure that we encapsulate everything within the software in order to recognise it. There’s 24 teams in the competition, and the app needs to recognise every player’s name in different types of accents. It’s still not 100% accurate, but the team is working in an agile manner to make sure they are optimising the experience as much as they can.

It’s very hard to validate whether there is a demand for this feature within the betting industry, because we are pioneering in this sector. Others have done it, but I don’t think they’ve done it in the way we have. But if we look at the parallel sectors, and look at the likes of Siri and Cortana, and Google’s voice-activation service, there is a massive hike in the number of users that are moving into voice and we’re using that as our benchmark. We would like to see this rolled out for football as a whole next season and across the app as a standard feature.