Players can get Lottery information using voice commands

Amazon’s Alexa now offers Virginia Lottery winning numbers, drawing dates and jackpot-value information. The Virginia Lottery Alexa Skill is easy to get. It’s also easy to use; all you have to do is ask the right questions.

Alexa can provide information on the Lottery’s games including Pick 3, Pick 4, Cash 5, Mega Millions, Powerball, Cash4Life® and Bank a Million. Alexa can check the latest winning numbers, find the next drawing date and time, and offer current jackpot values.

COLAB’s Eddie O’Leary (left) and the Lottery’s Terri Rose at the 2019 VOICE Summit in New Jersey.

Here are few examples of questions you can ask Alexa:

The Alexa Skill can help players on the go get information they need about the Lottery. More importantly, the Skill can help those who rely on voice commands to navigate their daily lives.

In July, the Lottery’s Director of Marketing Terri Rose, Marketing Manager Kelly Wilkes and Eddie O’Leary from the Lottery’s vendor partner COLAB attended the 2019 VOICE Summit in Newark, N.J. The event was focused on voice-activation technology, and the Lottery and its Alexa Skill were featured as a case study.

"Voice-activation technology is rather cutting-edge for lotteries, where accuracy is everything,” said Marketing Manager Kelly Wilkes. Cutting-edge indeed: The Virginia Lottery is one of the first few lotteries in the industry to offer such a tool.

If the Skill sounds like something that might be useful to you, that’s great. Getting it is easy. Here are the steps:

• Download the Amazon Alexa app in the Apple App store or Google Play.
• Enable the Skill. Either say “Alexa, enable Virginia Lottery,” OR, in your app, select Skills, and search for Virginia Lottery. Select Enable, and you’re done.

Look for new features coming to the Virginia Lottery Skill in the future; we’re excited to be at the forefront of bringing the benefits of voice technology to players!

_{Last Modified 10/18/19}