Q&A part 2: BetVictor CTO discusses which new technologies the firm is embracing

In the second part of an exclusive EGR Technology interview, BetVictor CTO Jonathan De La Rosa talks about how chatbots could become an important part of its future user interface and why voice recognition will add value to the industry.

BetVictor CTO Jonathan De La Rosa

EGR Technology: You’ve spoken to EGR Technology previously about how you think voice recognition technology can be used in egaming, will BetVictor be focusing on this technology in 2017?

Jonathan De La Rosa (JDLR): Voice recognition is something that we believe will really add value to the egaming industry. This year we have begun actively creating a framework around Micro Services and API’s to allow us to move quickly into the voice recognition market. 2017 will see voice-enabled platforms transform the customer experience and result in a much more actively engaged customer than we currently see.

Whilst we don’t envisage touch interfaces or keyboards disappearing in the short term, the user interface (UI) is likely to become increasingly screen-less like Amazon Alexa. And as technological innovators we are more than ready to embrace these new UI platforms to distribute our services. As voice recognition becomes more widely adopted in the consumer technology space, we will continue to provide players with the best gaming experience across all platforms and devices.

EGR Technology: Which new technologies do you think will take off (or not) in the New Year for the egaming industry? Will virtual reality take off, or is it too soon for the technology to become mainstream?

JDLR: There is a lot of talk about virtual reality taking off for good in 2017. Whilst it is a big buzz trend as we head in to the New Year, I can’t see it being too relevant for BetVictor at this moment in time. The hype that we saw around VR this year was mostly fueled by games such as Pokémon GO which incorporated augmented reality into its mobile application.

We are also seeing a number of industries adopting AR via the mobile platform e.g. furniture resellers, showing what the furniture you want to buy would look like in your home. We have recently launched augmented reality functionality around credit card scanning on our mobile product where we use the phone camera to capture the card number, expiry date and name on the card. We’ve removed a lot of customer data input when registering a new payment card and thus improved the customer experience; previously it was difficult and sometimes cumbersome, especially on a touch screen.

I am actually very keen on the chatbot technologies that are forming and feel that this will become an important aspect for our UI in the future. More and more people have their face in their phone and often ignore family or friends in their company; I envisage people in the medium term will communicate more via chatbots than they do with their loved ones!

EGR Technology: Looking back on 2016, what was the most important improvement BetVictor made to its technological capabilities?

 JDLR: We changed our technology organisation to have product driven development teams which is a combination of business and IT resources in the same team with the prime focus to deliver products that generate value for BetVictor. This initiative has made an amazing difference in the amount we can deliver and the agility to deliver. This also has really been the catalyst around innovation within BetVictor, as it has enabled us to deliver new ideas and concepts quickly and easily.

In 2016 we also moved to micro-services; this forced us to start untangling our monolithic applications. We also changed our technology culture to do daily performance testing on production utilising test automation. This was a big leap for BetVictor engineering teams in terms of adoption but this approach has paid dividends and we no longer specifically test for the major events e.g. Grand National, major football tournaments etc. as we are continuously stress testing the technology stack.

Over the last few years BetVictor has moved from a traditional betting and gaming company to a technology centric company. We are now morphing into an engineering company where we are providing highly complex technology engineering solutions both internally and also to our B2B partners.

Read the first part of the interview here.