We are only a day away from the official kickoff of the NFL regular season — defending Super Bowl champions the Seattle Seahawks will host the Green Bay Packers. The champs traditionally start off the season in a Thursday night matchup, and this year is no different.
Fresh off of a strong run with this summer’s world cup, predicting almost every game outcome correctly, Microsoft’s search engine now plans to tackle the National Football League.
The company is using a number of factors to shoot for as much accuracy as possible. Those include “examining outcomes from previous seasons including wins, losses, and the very rare tie outcome (two games since 2009), factoring in margin of victories, location of contest, playing surface and roof cover (or lack thereof), weather and temperature conditions, scoring by quarters, and multiple offensive and defensive statistics”.
The engine is also scouring the web, both sites and social media, for fans of various teams and taking into account their feelings about each team and game.
Since Bing also powers Cortana on Windows Phone, customers will be able to utilize the voice assistant on their handset to also check what the predicted outcome of a game is. As the the software grows smarter, we can expect these feature to expand as well.
It’s an interesting concept, and one that has paid off in the past (World Cup). We’ll see how Bing fairs with this particular sport, but past history gives positive indications.
Further reading: Bing
