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Sunday, April 28, 2002

Correction/Clarification: (Published April 30, 2002) In a Sunday horse racing item about trainer Elliot Walden, we said he suffered a broken ankle before the 1987 Belmont Stakes. In reality, the year was 1998. The item also noted that Touch Gold's victory in the Belmont foiled Silver Charm's bid to win the Triple Crown. True, but that was in 1997. In 1998, it was Victory Gallop, trained by Walden, which won the Belmont, thereby ruining Royal Quiet's bid to win the Triple Crown. All of which goes to prove Clem McCarthy was right when he advised fellow sportscaster Bill Stern, "Remember, Bill: You can't lateral a horse."

Welcome to XpressBet," Betty says. "May I have your account number? " Live or Memorex?

The latter, though Betty sounds natural as she goes on to request your PIN, review your account balance and ask for your first bet. Even if you mess up the pronunciation of a track at which you want a simulcast wager or misstate your wager, Betty eventually should be able to get it right.

"Betty" is the "personality" of the natural language speech recognition program now in a beta stage of testing among 50 telephone wagering system customers of MEC at The Meadows. It has been programmed to recognize all sorts of regional accents, strange pronunciations of tracks and deviations from the usual order in which a customer states his bet. The system is widely used in Australia.

After a few more days of testing and fine-tuning, customers across Western Pennsylvania will be offered a chance to "Just Talk to Betty." The system should be available to all XpressBet customers by mid-May or June, according Shirl McConville, director of XpressBet and supervisor of mutuels at The Meadows.

The current telephone wagering system will remain in place. Some bettors always will prefer dealing with human beings, and it would be difficult to program the voice-recognition system to recognize every kind of accent, syntax or style of wagering.

Still, McConville said, there are two good reasons to install the voice-recognition system.

"One advantage is scalability. Say we schedule how many tellers to come out to work, and if we have more [bettors] than anticipated, we can't create new bodies. With this, we have maximum capacity at all times. But the big advantage is the appeal it could have on the X generation who missed [exposure to] horse racing. This is a good way to begin to expose the sport to this generation -- through state-of-the-art technology."

The goal of the beta test, which follows two one-day tests at Santa Anita and The Meadows last week, is to get voice recognition up to 85 percent accuracy. Within two weeks after that, McConville said, Magna hopes the accuracy will be 95 percent.

McConville demonstrated a betting procedure via a conference call. After she made a phony trifecta wheel wager, Betty repeated back what she heard and asked if it were correct. McConville said no and repeated it. This happened once more before Betty got it right.

More Meadows notes

The Meadows resumes Sunday racing for the summer tonight, and the highlight of the card is a Pennsylvania Sires Stake for 3-year-old filly pacers. There are three $38,949 divisions of seven pacers each. Sunday racing will continue through Sept. 1.

At 1 p.m. tomorrow, Joe DiDonato, the track chaplain, will lead a dedication ceremony for a 4-foot bronze monument listing the 28 horses killed in a barn fire in July. The ceremony is at Peaceful Pastures Pet Cemetery inside Woodruff Memorial Park on Route 19 in Washington County.

A trip to the Derby

Emma Shaw, 11, of Slippery Rock, a horse lover who won a trip to the 2001 Santa Anita Derby in an essay contest, won another this spring, and this time the prize is a trip to the Kentucky Derby Saturday.

Emma and her mother, Charlene, leave Thursday and have tickets for the Kentucky Oaks Friday as well as the Derby. They also are scheduled for backside tours and have invitations to the winner's party at the Kentucky Derby Museum after the big race.

The topic for the essay contest was "What Triple Crown race is the most important." Emma chose the Derby, saying "It is the foundation that holds up the other two races. Without the strong bottom piece, the bucket would leak and fall apart."

A tip for hunch bettors

Fran LaBelle, the public relations man for Belmont Park, suggested hunch bettors might want to bet Harlan's Holiday in the Derby for a reason other than his obvious talent: Trainer Kenny McPeek is on crutches after breaking a metatarsal bone playing basketball.

In 1987, trainer Elliott Walden sustained a broken ankle playing basketball just before the Belmont. His horse, Touch Gold, won, denying Silver Charm the Triple Crown.

There is a difference between them, though. "I'm much faster than Elliott," McPeek said.

Pohla Smith can be reached at psmith@post-gazette.com.