The increasing esteem of artificial intelligence (AI) has saturated many sectors, and the world of sports betting has not been left untouched. As the need for dependable and unfailing sports betting tips continues to escalate, AI-powered chatbots have emerged as a revolutionary factor.
Bots, in essence, are what some still consider to be a "new form" of life. However, the same cannot be said for the sports betting industry. One needs only look online or to a newsreel to sense that computer-powered developments are gaining ground. For an industry that has had its fair share of computer phobia, both in sections of the industry's workforce and among those who bet, alternative forms of technology are making inroads and turning heads—and for good reason.
In the rapidly paced world of the "live" and "in-play" bettor, unfailing developments in computer technology have, thus far, yielded a damnably limited number of accurate and responsive systems. But advancements continue to be made all the same, and in the same spirit.
The use of artificial intelligence in sports, and the technology behind it, is quickly becoming an impactful way for AI sports betting picks to enhance user experience. At the forefront is the use of AI chatbots for real-time, human-like interaction between the user and the platform. In other contexts, we call these interactions "expert systems," and we design them using components of a field of AI called "model evolution."
The whole system is meant to yield increasing model accuracy and essentially increase the value of the recommendation. However, with our expert chatbot, the value yielded won't stay at the same plateau. It keeps rising as the overall system becomes more intelligent—that’s model evolution. This is how the Revolution of Artificial Intelligence has come to the world of sports gambling. This real-time interaction, together with the aforementioned evolution of models, provides the more informed decisions that bettors can use to increase their modest profits.
The AI chatbot has become a sophisticated tool for analyzing the abundant data of numerous sports and offering betting tips to users based on that analysis. The technology performs this work using advanced natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, which can search through the enormous analytics of sports and identify any pattern. If a pattern exists, the AI can figure out what it means; if it represents a certain player always hitting a home run in the first inning, then it's likely to happen again, based on the data, and the AI can share that information with the user.
Chatbots have also become much better at "conversing" with people. They can now talk to individuals and sound almost like a person. They don't sound forced or weird, and they can often match a real human's level of wittiness or intelligence when it comes to speaking and interacting. This is all by design, and it's intended to make using a sports data chatbot more like having a conversation with a friend, a friend who happens to be extremely knowledgeable about sports.
For those who place bets on sports, there is a new tool to add to the traditional methods that have long sustained the gambling market: artificial intelligence. If left to purely human endeavor, the selection of a winning outcome in a sports event would depend either on the insider knowledge of the bettor or on the hire of resources to help in the decision-making process. For instance, a sports gambler might wager on a team because said team won its last three games, because one of the team’s star players just became available to play in an upcoming game, or because the fan happens to be of the same ethnicity as the now-married-to-someone-else star player of a championship team.
A star player of that magnitude can command huge sums in an image rights deal with an organization largely funded by organized crime. When we consider these and other scenarios that might affect any team or game to which we might attach any of our dollars, we see that relying on artificial intelligence to do some background checking and thus allay our fears and inform our decisions is a not-to-be-missed opportunity. AI can be our friend.
The sports betting industry keeps growing, making the successful use of AI chatbots that serve as personal virtual assistants even more essential. How will bettors' access to AI-driven sports betting advice change when these AI helpers are much smarter than the bettors' themselves, and where the virtual conversational assistants so far have only limited betting "knowledge"?
A leading sports betting platform that has successfully integrated an AI chatbot — called "BetBot" — into its system renewed its commitment to the technology yesterday. This virtual assistant keeps giving bettors all the real-time information they need to analyze betting "events" in a faster and much more efficient way. A converging AI system is a more powerful predictive tool than an individual "gut feeling" of a single bettor.
Bettors using the same leading platform to place their bets cannot go wrong if they have AI at their side. They have artificial intelligence, real-time data analysis, and machine learning built into an algorithm that the virtual assistant, BetBot, uses to predict outcomes. This is the technology that is expected to impact 35-40% of all sports betting decisions.
Several ethical considerations must be made when using AI chatbots in sports betting, and these should be made with great caution and care.
The largest concern in this area is data privacy. Using AI invariably requires a significant amount of data, and in the case of chatbots that interact with human bettors, these conversations are likely to involve an exchange of personal and sensitive information. Handling, storing, and using this data responsibly is of great import. The rise of privacy-related concerns is a hot topic today and a key reason for that is the significant number of data breaches in recent years. The 2018 Federal Trade Commission heard 445 breaches involving almost half a billion records. And that's just in the USA. Seventy-five percent of these breaches were found to be financially motivated, with most of them involving the use of "personally identifiable information." When data is handled irresponsibly, or for the wrong reasons, people's privacy rights are forfeit, and they become exposed in ways that can lead to personal harm. (A secret relationship is exposed; Mom learns your secret; someone's life is upended because of a trove of information that makes them a target for blackmail... or worse.)
Ensuring that the data acquired by chatbots be managed responsibly increases the costs involved in developing and running them. This can result in either passing the costs on to the customer or making the chatbot's use financially nonviable. It's a concern that's every bit as weighty as the concern over how well an AI chatbot can deliver true predictions of a sports event's outcome. But if it's a choice between being expensive to use or being a force for good, then Preference must be given to the side of the bettor.
If these chatbots are seen as a threat to the privacy rights of people who use them, or conversely, as a threat to a betting organization's ability to profit, then I'm on the side of preference for the essential human right to privacy. And, even before the decision reached by the bettor is in the privacy of their data, there's the knowledge of how none of the chatbot's promises can be trusted, as long as it can't be fully understood by those betting on its word. Writing by Stephen J. A. Ward for Forbes on "The Ethics of AI, Part II."
The appearance of AI chatbots is set to change the world of sports betting. The artificial intelligent poker bots that have been shaking the online poker world for over a decade are now set to overhaul the sports betting industry. And mostly for good reasons.
In the past, birds of a feather flocked together in smoke-filled rooms to hammer out these decisions and place the bets. Then, as with everything in life, betting transformed and went online. This entailed some personal data collection on both the performance of sumo wrestlers and football players, as well as the fake identification of underage bettors to guard against underage betting.
So, how are AI chatbots set to change this world? In several ways, they're part of the world they inhabit. Let's investigate.
