Elly Yates-Roberts |
UK football club AFC Bournemouth has launched a new chatbot, the CherryBot, which uses emotion recognition and intelligent conversation artificial intelligence from Microsoft to identify emotion and adapt its response to fans.
CherryBot (the team’s nickname is The Cherries) can answer questions, let fans vote for their man of the match, and offer up information about the game. Fans can also take part in selfie competitions, which use Microsoft’s Emotion API to detect faces and feelings such as anger, happiness and surprise.
During Bournemouth’s match at the Vitality Stadium against Liverpool last month, fans uploaded over 400 selfies, and Facebook users sent more than 19,200 messages to the bot.
“CherryBot has been an exciting project to be involved in and it’s great to see the latest addition to the squad being so well received by AFC Bournemouth fans,” said Jamie Dalton, technical evangelist at Microsoft UK.
“Using Microsoft Azure AI cognitive services, we’re delighted to see how CherryBot engaged and entertained fans on matchday,” he added. “We look forward to working with AFC Bournemouth and [local digital agency] Greenwood Campbell to roll out additional functionality for fans in the coming weeks.”