The world of sports is getting closer and closer to new technologies. The latest amazing innovation is that the prestigious Wimbledon tennis tournament has introduced AI-powered commentary to match highlight videos as part of its tournament coverage.
The All England Club, the London club that organizes this Grand Slam, works on this project with the IBM group, its technology partner for many years, for both audio commentary and subtitles automatically generated by artificial intelligence in its published videos of the best moments. of the tournament.
The service will be available on the Wimbledon app and website from July 3-16. To make this initiative a reality, IBM will use the watsonx AI platform, which has been trained in the "single language of tennis" with the help of the All England Club. In fact, the club already regularly uses IBM's artificial intelligence technology to offer its player quality index, analyzing their statistical performance.
Tournament coverage will also include AI-based analysis of the singles draws. This feature will examine how favorable a player's path to the Grand Finals can be. "This new information will help tennis fans uncover potential surprises in the singles draw that would not be apparent if only player rankings were taken into account," IBM said in a statement.
The data generated in the tournament, such as ball tracking, player tracking or the type of shots that players make from different parts of the court, will be collected directly from the court. They will then be fed into the IBM platform, where they will be processed by the company's artificial intelligence models before being sent to a chatbot system that will produce natural language feedback, specially tailored to the language of tennis and Wimbledon.
These comments will also be transmitted to a second text-to-speech AI to convert them into audio commentary in near real time.
According to IBM, this initiative is one more step towards the generation of AI comments for complete matches. In this regard, the European Broadcasting Union announced last year that the cloned voice of commentator Hannah England will be used to comment on the European Athletics Championships.
