ialottery blog

He’s Always Working: Meet Dave, The Iowa Lottery’s Newest Team Member

A new team member has joined the Iowa Lottery, and you may have already been helped by his work.

His name is Dave and he’s a chatbot. When you visit ialottery.com, you now see a blue chat symbol in the lower right corner of the screen. The symbol tells you that the Iowa Lottery has a digital assistant available to help answer questions.

If you click on the symbol, the chatbot screen opens. Five popular search topics come up, or you can use the screen to type in your own question.

Now, Dave obviously isn’t a real person. Chatbot software uses artificial intelligence to mimic a conversation. Statistics show that nearly 70 percent of global consumers have used a chatbot in the past year, and the use of chatbots continues to rise.

Best-practice tips say that a chatbot should have a name and personality in line with the organization it represents. We wanted our chatbot to be friendly and engaging with an obvious Iowa connection.

So, you’ll notice that Dave is definitely an Iowa bot, and he’s got a happy smile.

Dave can already answer more than 200 questions about the Iowa Lottery and its products. As we see new questions being asked through the chat screen, we add in more answers.

Our goal in adding a chatbot to our website is to help you easily find information about the Iowa Lottery and its products. The bot helps us deliver customer service 24/7, even at times when our offices are closed.

So why is our chatbot named Dave? Go ahead, ask him. He can tell you. He’s got thoughts about the weather, too. But Dave's main purpose is that he knows a lot of in-depth details about the Iowa Lottery.

Welcome to the lottery team, Dave!

We’ve Added Links On Our Homepage To Make Our App Easier To Find

We’ve added new links on our homepage to make our lottery app easier to find.

We made that update after getting feedback from some of our players who said they wanted a more direct way to find the mobile app. 

Now when you go to www.ialottery.com, at the top of the homepage where we list our social media platforms, you’ll find a new mobile phone icon that will take you to the details about our app. And at the bottom of the homepage, we’ve added a link for our app to the list of ways that folks can “Connect With Us.” 

Our app is available for both Apple and Android devices. If you already have it, you know you can use it to check your tickets, enter our promotions, find a retailer near you, and access the details about our games.

And if you haven’t downloaded our app yet, now it’s that much easier to find!

 

Our Winning Numbers Hotline Is Back Up!

An update for anyone who tried to call our winning numbers hotline over the weekend: It was down for about a day, but it’s back up and in service today.

The winning numbers hotline (515-323-4633) is one of the ways we provide the drawing results in our lotto games. Twice a day, we record new messages on the line to update the results of our drawings as they become available.

The system stopped functioning between the time that we recorded Saturday night’s drawing results and tried to record the results from Sunday’s midday drawings. The number would continually ring but never pick up.

To fix the situation, the hardware that hosts the winning numbers line needed to be reset. That process took some time, but the line was back up and functioning by midmorning today. We were just able to record the results for today’s midday drawings.

As I mentioned earlier, that hotline is just one of the ways that we make our winning numbers available. You can always visit our website to find the same information, sign up for our winning numbers emails, or find the details at your local lottery retailer.

 

 

Lottery Website Is Back Up!

UPDATE: Apparently, all we needed to do to get our website back up was to post a blog entry saying that it was down. :)

Of course, it was a lot more work than that. But the good news is that our website came back up at about 4:30 p.m. today.

We're working right now to update some drawing information and a few other details that weren't able to post while our site was down. That work should be completed within the hour, and things can get back to normal!  

Here are the details we posted earlier this afternoon: 

If you’ve tried to visit the Iowa Lottery’s website in the past day or so, you’ve noticed that it’s down. We’re aware of the situation and are working with our vendors to get things fixed as quickly as possible. But technological issues can take time to work through. We wish the site was already back up, and please know that we’re working on it.

At about 9:15 p.m. Thursday, construction work in the Kansas City area severed a major fiber-optic line serving a data center that houses the equipment for not only the Iowa Lottery’s website, but many other websites around the country. That initial outage then caused other equipment to fail, and our site has been dark since that time.

We are working on a number of fronts to bring our site back up. Our vendors both in the Kansas City area and here in Iowa are working to fix equipment outages. We also are investigating whether we can migrate our website at least temporarily to another hosting platform. Any of that work will take time to accomplish.

The website outage has not impacted other lottery functions. Our drawings are proceeding as normal, and we’re posting our drawing results in all the usual ways (minus the website, which is down). We’re temporarily putting special postings on many of our social media platforms to provide the winning numbers and you of course can access the details as normal in our retail locations and from our winning numbers line at 515-323-4633.

The outage on our main website also is not interfering with “Holiday Hoopla,” our holiday promotion currently underway. The lottery's VIP Club website is on a separate platform from our main website, so the VIP Club site has not been impacted. Players can feel free to continue to enter the promotion at www.ialotteryvip.com.

We’ll give updates on our website progress as we can. In the meantime, please bear with us, and we truly apologize for any inconvenience.

 

Could There Be Internet Lottery Sales in Iowa?

With Internet lottery sales kicking off yesterday in Illinois, we're now getting questions about the possibility of Internet lottery sales here in Iowa. Here's the 411:

This is an issue we've been talking about with legislators and during general discussions for the past couple years because we knew it was on the horizon. The Iowa Lottery believes it has the authority to offer sales on the Internet, but we continue to study the issue and have no immediate plans to take that step today. We're watching what's happening around the country, including what's just started in Illinois.
 
There's been no big public outcry for Internet lottery sales here in Iowa, so we would not anticipate anything soon. As responsible public officials, we would work with state lawmakers on any details along those lines.

Internet sales are definitely a way to modernize delivery, just like what's already being done with online betting on horse racing in Iowa. We want everyone to be prepared for the issue and to have the most information possible to make the best decisions.

Whatever happens, we do think it is important that Iowa protect its borders. By that we mean that we want Iowa lawmakers and regulators to be the ones making the decisions relating to gaming in our state, and for the money raised from gaming in Iowa to stay in our state to benefit worthy causes here.

Yep, We've Got A New App For That!

Add the Iowa Lottery to the list of entities that can say, "Yep, we've got an app for that!"

The lottery has added a free app on iTunes that you can install on your mobile device to keep up with all the latest.

To add the app, just visit the App Store in iTunes and install the Iowa Lottery's LotteryPlus Mobile app. The app can run on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad devices running IOS 3.2 and above.

You can use the app's barcode scanner to check your lotto tickets, or you can key in the serial number from your lotto ticket to see if it’s won a prize. The app also supplies the current jackpot amounts and the latest winning numbers in games like Powerball®, Mega Millions® and Hot Lotto®.

You also can use the app to find the closest lottery retailers to your current location by using your device's location services. And maybe the coolest feature of the app allows you to shake your device using the app's plays feature to generate a lotto play. You then can take your device to a local lottery retailer and have the barcode on your screen scanned to purchase that ticket. We do want to clarify, however, that the app doesn't allow you to actually play the lottery online.

You know, we all want our information on the go these days and this is one more way the lottery can get you the details you want when - and where - you want them. And plus, we just really like saying, "Yep, we've got an app for that!"

The lottery is offering the app in conjunction with Georgia-based Scientific Games International, the company that the lottery has a contract with for its statewide gaming network that’s used to sell and cash tickets. We are looking into the possibility of adding apps for other mobile platforms, but this one will get us started.

Iowa is known for being a tech-savvy state and we're proud to continue that tradition of innovation with this new app!

Website Issues, Please Bear With Us

You may have noticed that the lottery has been having some issues with our website.

The lottery's site was impacted yesterday by a hardware failure at the server that hosts it. Everybody has bad days once in a while, right? And if you've ever worked on a website before, you know things like that are often outside your control. You just have to do the best you can to work with the situation!

We've been in contact numerous times with our server provider to ensure that our site is back up and fully operational as quickly as possible. A lot of progress has been made, but please be aware that there may continue to be difficulties with our website over the weekend as the fixes continue. We hope that all the work will be completed by Monday.

Thanks for visiting our site and thank you for your understanding!