Source: Simon M Bruty / Getty
Wimbledon’s All England Club will be introducing artificial intelligence-powered commentary and captions for its coverage at this year’s tournament.
“This new insight will help tennis fans to uncover anomalies and potential surprises in the singles draw, which would not be apparent by looking only at the players’ ranking,” IBM, which developed the technology, said.
IBM trained its watsonx AI platform to utilize the “unique language of tennis,” with the help of the All England Club. The Club already uses IBM’s AI technology to provide features such as its player power index, which analyses player performance.
Data, such as tracking data for the ball, tracking data for the players and the type of shots the players make from different parts of the court, is collected from a variety of sources around the court. It will then be fed into IBM’s platform, where it will be processed by the company’s AI models before ultimately being fed to a chatbot-style system that produces natural language commentary, specifically fine-tuned in the language of tennis and Wimbledon. That commentary can also be handed on to a second text-to-speech AI to turn it into audio commentary in near real-time.
Though there are no plans to replace live human commentary, there is speculation that AI commentary could one day take over. However, IBM Sports Partnerships Leader Kevin Ferrar doesn’t believe that will be the case.
“I see AI as very much complementing the human element, rather than replacing,” he said. “You can’t replace John McEnroe doing commentary, that human element always needs to be there. It’s very much supplementing and complementing.”
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