Fancy a flutter on Argentina to win the World Cup, but can't face the prospect of going down to the high street betting shop, with torn-up slips on the counters and an unhappy group of punters watching a wall of TV screens showing horse and greyhound racing?

"It is good for us that betting shops are generally squalid and unappealing places," says Ed Pownell, spokesman for Blue Square, the UK-based interactive betting company. "As long as the majority of people are uncomfortable going into them, they are more inclined to bet through other channels - such as us."

Blue Square's growth appears to bear out the premise that people are inclined to bet more frequently if they can do so quickly and easily, preferably without leaving the comfort of their sofa.

Blue Square provide services on digital TV, the internet and via mobile phones.

From its beginnings as an internet-only operation in May 1999, it has the most users and derives the majority of revenues from its web operations. However, the telephone betting service, launched in October last year, has rapidly found a following and is now generating 15 per cent of turnover in just over six months, posting the fastest growth rate of the three channels.

The company quickly realised that the rapid rise in phone betting, particularly via mobiles, would put a huge strain on its two call centres during a big event and that it might lose existing customers, as well as potential clients.

"The telephone betting took off very quickly and with the Grand National looming - we realised it wasn't a viable proposition to outsource or draft in extra people for the day," says Ed Andrewes, commercial director at Blue Square. "Also, we had to think ahead to the World Cup."

So Blue Square drafted in Fluency Voice Technology, a Cambridge-based voice technology company, to provide a back-up system to cope with the overflow calls.

"The Grand National [held this year on April 6] is the single biggest day of the year for betting, but over the whole month of the World Cup, the volumes will beat anything the betting industry has ever seen," says Mr Pownell. "To trial the system for the World Cup, the only realistic event to try it on was the National, because of the volume. It took Blue Square until the end of last year to beat what we took on the Grand National in one day, but now those figures are just an average Saturday for us."

"We only had nine weeks from the sign off in mid-January to build, test and deploy a full speech recognition system," says Paul Barnes, Fluency's chief executive. "There were two main issues: there are a great number of people wanting to bet on the National, which itself causes a huge influx of calls, and also you get a whole lot of people who only bet once or twice a year, so the ratio of new customers per bet is very high, meaning a deluge of registration calls which take longer."

A rush of bets

Fluency, which is not tied to one core technology vendor, uses open standards such as Voice XML. The company delivered a system which was able to cope with more than 5,000 transactions per hour and can also pick up betting slang and jargon - such as "put a monkey (£500) on Red Marauder".

"This is very important," says Mr Barnes. "Otherwise, it would take so long to make a bet, I don't think anyone would bother. You can also have the option of switching back to a person at any time."

Fluency provided an interactive voice system that greets callers and takes them through a registration process, with the information confirmed using text-to-speech synthesis. Once registered, customers can place multiple bets working in harmony with the existing call centres to provide them with a consistent experience.

"The system traces parameters in the English language to give close matches. Each description links into a code. Rather like being a librarian, cross-referencing and locating the precise item," says Mr Barnes.

Last year, Blue Square took more than 71,000 telephone bets on the day of the race, and this year it was 118,000 with 12,000 new accounts set up. Turnover was well over £1m. "I think the voice recognition did well in its first test - it was there to take the overflow only if all 85 telephonists were busy, so it was the reserve, but will now come in to its own during the World Cup where the hours of the events are much less sociable," says Mr Pownell.

"Basically, we will probably have the phone lines open from about 6am for the 7am kick-offs, but can offer the internet and voice recognition before then."

Fluency's voice-recognition back-up also enabled Blue Square to promote its betting services through a high profile national advertising campaign. Striking blue and white posters with wording such as: "Married mum of 3 seeks wild weekend with young stallion," and "slim, sensitive male, 30, seeks big frisky filly to go the distance," were much in evidence in the run-up to the race. Blue Square's voice recognition system is still in its infancy compared to that of Littlewoods and the Tote which used a telephone speech recognition system to handle 35,000 bets during this year's Grand National. Their systems, developed by SRC, the British speech recognition company, took more than 18,000 calls (61,000 call minutes) and held over £200,000 in stakes for the two bookies.

The odds on further growth in voice recognition technology and phone betting are good. "Telephone betting is poised to become a huge growth market," according to Chris Fletcher, solutions development manager at BT Ignite. "Just as they did on the internet, porn and betting services will blaze the way for mobile services. I'll put money it."

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