The Bing Predict engine is switching focus to NFL matches

Sep 4, 2014 18:41 GMT  ·  By

Pretty much everyone knows that Cortana and Bing managed to guess the winner of most matches during the World Cup in Brazil, mostly thanks to the fact that Microsoft bragged about it on every occasion, so it’s no surprise that the company is now trying to do the same with NFL matches.

The Bing Predict engine, which was at the core of the system that helped guess the winner of matches during the World Cup, will thus be used in the NFL, obviously giving Bing and Cortana users the chance to predict the outcome of the upcoming matches.

Microsoft says that Bing Predict was specifically tweaked to become even better for the NFL, and the company has a very detailed explanation on how exactly it did that:

“For pro football, we model the respective strengths of the teams by 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.”

“In addition to this prior model, we identify fans on Web and Social sites and track their sentiment to understand the aggregate wisdom of this expressive crowd. This introduces data which statistics alone cannot capture, providing real-time adjustments which surprisingly can capture injury news and other substantive factors in win probabilities.”

Needless to say, all services based on Bing and featuring the Predict technology can be used to guess the winner of NFL games, but as always, it’s more fun to listen to the sweet voice of Cortana telling you the result of the next match.