Cortana again predicts the winner of a competition

May 25, 2015 10:03 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft's Bing prediction engine has once again managed to guess the winner of a competition, after having done exactly the same thing one year ago at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, when it correctly indicated the result of 15 out of 16 knockout games.

As we reported to you not a long time ago, the Microsoft Bing prediction engine monitored online trends, social activity, and past statistics to determine the winner of the Eurovision 2015 singing contest, and as it turns out, it correctly predicted not only the first place but also the second and the third.

The first prediction that Microsoft's Bing (which is powering Cortana personal assistant, used as the main character for providing us with these predictions) made was that Italy had the biggest chances to win Eurovision, followed by Sweden, Australia, and Russia.

Just before the show started, however, Bing updated these statistics and put Sweden on the first place, followed by Russia, Italy, and Australia. And yet, Bing failed to correctly predict Australia's place, as the fourth place went to Belgium.

How it works

The Bing predict engine uses a complex algorithm to determine the outcome of a specific competition, which includes past history, user content indexed by search engines, and social media activity.

“We have learned that web activity is less biased than polling, so more insights can be extracted from using web trends than the traditional polling method. Past work has shown that people, when polled or surveyed publicly, might respond with biases, intentional or otherwise, whereas aggregate web activity does not contain such biases,” Microsoft explains in a blog that provides an in-depth look at the engine.

Needless to say, since Bing is the underlying engine powering several other Microsoft products, including Cortana personal assistant, there are several ways to interact with these features, so it shouldn't be too hard to get access to these predictions.

Until now, Microsoft has correctly predicted the winners of 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, Oscars 2015, the Scottish Referendum vote, American idol, The Voice, and Dancing with the Stars.