With more and more people, industries, and businesses around the world being swayed and affected by emerging trends in technology, as well as a world pandemic, casinos have, likewise, been going through some dramatic changes recently. Less people are visiting actual live casinos by the day and moving towards online digital alternatives instead.
Even without the added impetus of Covid-19 though, certain new advances in technology were already paving way for transformation. One of the most notable of these being AI, which is now helping to improve virtually every aspect of the casino industry, from its games to its management, to the overall user experience.
What is AI?
“Artificial Intelligence” has become a very broad and common term these days, used to label a variety of automated online and computer processes. Simply put though, AI is generally any computer-based system that mimics or performs tasks that require some sort of intelligence, decision-making, creative ability, or other human-like quality.
The level of “intelligence” or complexity of AI can range from being a very simple and basic supplementary feature, to being a highly complex and vital core process. However, the “intelligence” of AI is generally meant to refer to what it replaces or augments, ie. human intelligence, rather than the fictional idea of having any sentient intelligence of its own.
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Better Customer Support
Good customer support is generally a vital cornerstone for businesses and services, and a major aspect of that is how quick and helpful the response is.
AI virtual assistance has been advancing rapidly over the years to provide online customer care that is immediate, intuitive, and efficient. These days it largely comes in the form of help-bots and smart chat boxes, which are proving especially useful for online casinos, allowing them to handle support for a far larger customer-base, who are often from different countries, than they would otherwise.
AI is currently able to achieve subtle aspects of communication like understand and ignore spelling errors, predict intention and needs, and soon might even be able to ascertain moods and sense of urgency.
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A More Enjoyable Overall Experience
Another beneficial use of AI is that it can be used as a sort of “manager” for any online or computer process, running in the background and making sure everything continues to be stream-lined and efficient. This translates into a far smoother and overall more enjoyable experience for the user, especially in terms of ease-of-use. E.g. for receiving customer support, as mentioned above, but also creating and accessing accounts and profiles, navigating sites, playing the games, and much more.
“Machine learning” a subset of AI computer science, is also being used to improve games by constantly learning and discovering ways to make the processes and functions of games more streamlined, fun, and realistic for the players.
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Better Marketing
Analytics is huge in this day and age of information, and good marketing is another way that the overall quality of casinos and user experience is constantly improved, along with the casino profits of course. Whether in relation to consumer needs, generating profit, or both, every major company and business today, though, fully recognises the utmost importance of demographic data.
AI has proved highly useful when it comes to collecting and analysing data for marketing purposes and is being utilised across many online platforms at this very moment for that purpose. It allows businesses like casinos to predict rising trends, stay in league with competitors, and offer deals that are more attractive and better suited to their current, and potential, customers.
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An Aid For Sports Betting
Sports betting has become more and more popular in recent years, and is very rapidly catching up to online casino games as a popular choice of gambling entertainment around the world.
AI helps to improve many areas of sports betting, from the management of sports books, to being able to identify optimal lines of games based on stats like team strength and likely behaviour. This allows AI to make more accurate and reliable forecasts of sporting events and provide more suitable betting options for bettors.
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Better Security
Although land-based casinos are dwindling in customers, they aren’t about to disappear just yet, and still have to deal with huge amounts of money, requiring a huge amount of security and management.
AI is well in use when it comes to most live casino surveillance systems, keeping track of the casino-goers, and helping to spot banned players and other potential troublemakers, using facial recognition technology along with instant access to casino records and databases.
AI is also being used more and more for online security, in prevention of cyber attacks, dealing with network issues and anomalies, and providing protection of sensitive data from hackers and cyber criminals.
Conclusion
AI has been proving itself to be a crucial element in the steady march of technology and will undoubtedly become more and more a part of our daily lives, along with business and industry, in the near future.
Although movies and sci-fi media often tend to paint AI as being rather sinister, such a deceptive trickster like in the films 2001 – A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina or giving rise to a world of machine overlords as depicted in the Terminator and Matrix movies. Rest assured though. As amazing and human-like as AI may seem to be in some instances, in reality its “intelligence” is generally very limited and restricted to its function and process. Therefore, it is not in danger of gaining sentience, and consequently megalomaniac ambitions, any time soon, or perhaps ever.
Quantum computing, and perhaps, the combine networks of the world’s internet, are currently the only man-made things that can even closely compare to, or resemble, the great complexity of the human brain and its processes and neural networks. Even then, what creates our human “consciousness” and “intelligence” is not very well understood, never mind reproducible.
Rather, AI will likely continue to be increasingly useful as an augmentative tool, for casinos like zarcasino.co.za or otherwise, enabling us to do more, and create more, than was ever previously possible.
