March is over, and so too is the madness. The basketball tournament of the year has come to an end, and as we crown Villanova the champions of 2018, we also bow to the perennially useful Alexa, who successfully predicted the Wildcats’ victory. While she may have had a bit of trouble in the last few weeks responding to your queries and controlling her laughter, it seems that all these issues are now in the past, and she has redeemed herself with some pretty impressive clairvoyance.
March Madness, the collegiate basketball tournament, kicked off on Thursday, March 15, and came to its dramatic finale on April 2. In total, 67 games were played, and at the end, Villanova came out on top. This was something that Alexa said would happen from the very beginning of the tournament — had you asked her a couple weeks ago who she thought would emerge victorious, she would have told you that Villanova’s powerful offense would help the team bring the trophy home. Folks only had to ask Alexa, “Who will win March Madness?” to hear her prediction.
Unfortunately, Alexa wasn’t able to help anyone with creating their brackets. Although she was able to correctly predict who would win the overall tournament, she wasn’t able to (or was unwilling to) tell us who would win each individual game. However, another smart assistant did offer that functionality — Microsoft Cortana.
Cortana pulled her data from the Bing web browser, and actually did offer a prediction on each and every game to be played. Alas, Cortana and Alexa didn’t see eye to eye on their final predictions — the Microsoft smart assistant opted for the University of Virginia. Of course, that prediction turned out to be decidedly incorrect, as the team was knocked out in the first round, ending a 135-game undefeated run by top seeds in an opening game.
Other smart assistants, however, never even got in on the action. We asked Google Home who would win March Madness, but it said it couldn’t help with that yet. And now it’s too late (though there’s always next year).
So congratulations, Alexa and Villanova — this really does seem to be your year.
Updated on April 3: Alexa correctly predicted Villanova’s March Madness victory.
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