Microsoft has been using Bing as a crystal ball when it comes to sport events. Starting with the World Cup, Bing has been making predictions on sporting and entertainment events. Users can ask Cortana who will win football games this weekend and she will use Bing’s best guess. Now Microsoft is stepping into the NFL playoffs to see how well Bing can predict the outcomes.
Predicting sports games has been the proving grounds for Microsoft’s machine learning algorithms. By feeding data to their systems, Microsoft can generate a prediction. It isn’t magic but the system is very good at predicting who will win and who will lose. Targeting sport events is a good way for Microsoft to test and improve their prediction capabilities. In the future, Microsoft will be able to sell this ability to customers looking to predict events more relevant to their business, like customer demand, traffic, suspicious behavior, weak points in a process, and more.
It makes sense that Microsoft would continue to predict the next event. Now that event is the NFL playoffs. Bing has predictions for each division as well as who they think the wildcard will be. Microsoft reminds fans to keep checking their predictions because they plan to update their projections when more relevant data becomes available throughout the end of the season.
