How Voxbet Simplifies Sportsbook Navigation with AI-Powered Voice Recognition

How can operators bring novelty to sports betting and appeal to a young audience? The DataArt team met with Jonathan Power, Managing Director at Voxbet, and Ian Marmion, Investor & Board Director at Voxbet, to discuss how voice recognition technology can add entertainment and personalization to fans’ experience. Jonathan and Ian talk about the importance of investing in UX, introduce a hands-free betting concept, and predict the future of the sports betting market.

SPEAKERS

Russell Karp, Senior Vice President in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice, focusing on sports betting.

Jonathan Power, Managing Director at Voxbet. Voxbet is a technology company that enables sports bettors to speak or type what they want from a sportsbook, whether a bet, a market, or a tip. Voxbet is rapidly expanding its unique capacity and versatility and aims to leverage its tech, in synergy with modern digital search trends, to become an organic vehicle for the way players interact with betting.

Ian Marmion, Investor and Board Director at Voxbet.

Kevin Twitchell, advisor in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice.

Watch the full video or read a shortened text version below.

Russell Karp: Can you go a little deeper into what Voxbet does and some of the products you offer? How do you differentiate yourself from the competition in the market?

Jonathan Power: Well, we’re bringing something novel to the sportsbook user experience. The sportsbook user experience hasn’t changed since it first launched online more than 20 years ago, more than 25 years ago. So, what we’re bringing is a very simple product, which is a little microphone that people can put on their betting site or in their app where it’ll work very similar to the microphone people use on WhatsApp all the time or a certain cohort of people use on WhatsApp all the time, which is young people, and where you press and speak what it is you want, you let go, and there it is.

So, that’s the product we’re bringing to the market, and we have it working for horse racing at the moment. We’re extending it into sports right now, which we’ll have in the early part of next year. So, we’re trying to create a ubiquitous navigation method for people to get to where they want to get to on a sportsbook.

It’s a bet mic, what we would call that product. It’s as simple to explain as that. And what’s happening underneath is far from simple. And in terms of how that differentiates, it brings a number of advantages to the operator or the consumer, and the first is speed. If the way you currently navigate a sportsbook is how you used to navigate the Internet with AOL and Yahoo! in the mid-90s. And when Google came along; at the time Google launched, there were two million websites. We did a check on just one of the customer’s operators we work with, and at any one time, there’re over two million things you can bet on. And when a game goes in-play, there are many times more than that.

So, you’re still offering an AOL-style user interface, which is going through endless clicks of menus to get to what you want in a world that moved to Google 20 years ago. So, the first advantage is a user experience advantage: speed. And the other thing you can potentially see where it can open up an advantage for operators is it can free up real estate.

At the moment, all the real estate is taken up with content. So, that has two things. The direct consequence of that is everybody looks the same. Now, it’s not just that everybody looks the same, operator to operator, which is true. It also means that your version of, let’s say, FanDuel and my version of FanDuel, even though we might bet on completely different things, look 100% identical.

So, FanDuel and TwinSpires, whatever they might be, are 98, 99% identical. But my version of FanDuel, your version of FanDuel, and Ian’s version of FanDuel are 100% identical. And that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the digital world. It doesn’t happen on Spotify, it doesn’t happen on Twitter, it doesn’t happen on TikTok, it doesn’t happen on Amazon, but it happens in sports betting.

Jonathan Power

Managing Director at Voxbet

And the reason for that is that there’s only one way of navigating the content, which is through endless menus. So, all the content is accessible through the same set of menus. And when you do that, you’ve no room for anything else. But if you can navigate the whole sportsbook by speaking or typing, by the way, it’s not just speaking; you can type either for those who prefer. You free up, probably, 90% of the real estate, and that 90% of the real estate should become what I like to bet on, what the bookmakers and what the operator thinks I might be interested in, but what I’ve also expressly said I’m interested in or not interested in.

If I went on to a sportsbook now, I could be offered a bet on tennis. Well, I should be able to, not me, but people younger than me would do one tender and just swipe left. So, they’re not interested, and I won’t ever see it again. That should be how I should be able to configure it. So, I’m interested in that; I bet on that. I’ve won on this before. Every time this horse is running, I want to know about it; every time this team is playing, I want to know about it. So, over time, if you can free up the real estate of content and allow for personalization, your version of FanDuel and my version of FanDuel are completely different and will align sportsbooks with everything else in the digital space.

And a key part of that is not just about improving the user experience for existing players; it’s about appealing to young people. And young people have been asked to engage with something. That is, and this is where Ian might be able to talk a little bit about this because it’s one of the real challenges in the business he’s involved in. How would you appeal to young people?

They’re very different, and we could say they’re so different that they don’t even -like we thought text messaging was a dream instead of a phone call. But now that’s gone further, and they won’t even type a message; they’ll send it as a voice message. They engage very differently.

Kevin Twitchell: When you’re in the in-car experience, listening to baseball, which I did growing up, and this year just being enamored by the World Cup and driving my kids to their sporting events, being in the car, how soon are we to be able to make that bet while I’m driving?

Jonathan Power: Yeah, something we discovered as we got into and when we decided to go all in on voice with the business is that there are many, many different paradigms of what can happen or how that should look. And the paradigm we’ve gone for to start with is a bet mic that you press and hold and speak, and then we show you what it is you asked for, and then you tap, but you complete the transaction when you tap.

And the reason we’ve picked that one is we think it’s the most common use case. It saves me from having to charge through layers and layers of menus. But there’re two after that that we’re going to do. One of them is the one you’ve just mentioned, we called that paradigm the Hands-Free Paradigm, which is you’re cooking, and you’re listening to the podcast, previewing the games, and you think, “I want to have a bet here” and that’s why I have to take out my phone with that chopping chicken, or whatever it is I’m doing, but my hands are free.

I’m driving, and I should be able to line that bet up by just speaking it. And even if it then has to come through via a personalized push notification that I press on, there’s the bet sleep, with my pretty populated, with my steak and everything. So, the location check can be done because the bet, in the US at least, must happen on the platform, and the US and Australia would have that restriction, but in many other places, it wouldn’t.

It can happen via a direct messaging channel without having to go through the location checking. So that’s one of the paradigms we’re going to work on next year, which is hands-free. And another one we see is in play, so in-game. So, you’re watching, streaming, and at the moment, they split the screen between the bit you can watch the action on and half a screen on things you can bet on, which are pre-formed by the operator to say these are the things you’re probably going to want to bet on, which tend to be the low margin products where it should be, the whole screen should be taken up with the action and with a little mic in the corner that you press and speak what it is you want. It’ll just continue the journey from there.

So, we’re starting with the bet mic experience, in which you press and speak and see what you want. We’re moving into the hands-free experience, and that’ll be late in the second half of 2023. And from there, we’re very keen on the streaming experience with a whole real estate that can be taken up with the action, and the betting experience can be condensed into a mic. So, the other three paradigms we’re going after.

Russell Karp: What do you see happening in the next year or two in the sports betting market? UK or US, or both are fine for your predictions?

Ian Marmion: Yeah. So, as we did with the US specifically, you’ve continued to see a big growth in in-play. So, in-play accounts for about 70% of the business in Bet365 over here. Once they get aggressive in the US market, you’ll see a big growth in that. And if you look at companies like PointsBet, who’ve invested in the technology to build their in-play models and make it a cutting-edge experience, the reason for that is you’re trying to convert gambling into gaming, in effect.

So, you’re trying to create almost a slot machine effect, where you can bet on the result in the next play, will he kick the extra point or not, all these what we call minute markets over here. On a more macro level, you’re going to see a big growth in the non-traditional markets.

I do a lot of work in Africa, one of the biggest growth markets from a sports betting perspective. And the reason sports betting is great is, almost without exception, you’re selling the same product everywhere. It is effectively soccer and everywhere outside of the US.

I think Africa will be a big growth market, LatAm will be a very big growth market, and you’ll see some of the Middle East and Asian countries open up as well. And I think you’ll see the likes of flutters and the interest of the world turning the focus to the non-traditional markets where there’s more juice left in the lemon.

Ian Marmion

Investor and Board Director at Voxbet

There’s very little juice left in the lemon in the UK and there’s certainly very little juice left in the lemon in the US unless you’ve got FanDuel’s lemons.

So, you’ll see people turn to different markets a little bit more. We’ll still sell the same product. In the US, it will be you’re dominated by football and then supplemented by basketball and soccer. And over here, it will continue to be soccer dominated and then supported by local sports.

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By Russell Karp,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt

Originally published at https://www.dataart.com/.