When we learned that Cortana was going to be predicting the FIFA World Cup matches, to which she predicted most of them correctly, we figured it was only a matter of time until she started predicting more soccer/football leagues, and now she does.
In the world of soccer, it doesn’t get more exciting than the Barclay’s Premier League, where anything can happen. Unlike Spain’s Liga BBVA where Real Madrid and Barcelona are strong favorites going into every match they play, it’s far more likely for something unpredictable to happen in the Premier League. This should make it difficult for Cortana, so it will be interesting to see what she comes up with.
While Microsoft didn’t specify exactly how Cortana and the Bing Prediction engine works in this case, we assume it would include some of the same techniques used to predict the World Cup matches. This would entail evaluating team strength as factors such as previous win/loss/tie records and the margin of victory in those matches, in addition to other variables such as home advantage, playing surface, and match-time weather conditions among others.
If you have Cortana on your Windows Phone 8.1 device, all you have to do is ask her who will win a certain match. Everton play Liverpool in an upcoming derby so asking Cortana “Who will win the match between Everton and Liverpool?” should result in the following response:
Microsoft will continue to add new capabilities to Cortana on a regular basis, and since all the changes happen on the company’s end, users don’t need to upgrade the OS to get the new features.
