Starting on Monday, top tennis players began competing for the highly esteemed tennis trophy, Wimbledon. But there is a winner already, artificial intelligence, which is taking over the commentary this year.
One of the significant changes for this year’s Wimbledon tournament, for good or bad, could transform the broadcast coverage.
The All England Lawn Tennis Club has announced new AI-powered commentary for Wimbledon that will debut at this year’s Championships. Wimbledon is planning to offer audio and text commentary on its app and website through the use of AI technology.
The feature uses IBM‘s AI platform, Watson, to analyze ball tracking data, player locations, and the types of shots being used on the court. The AI then generates commentary based on the information provided.
A generative AI model based on the foundation language models was used to create engaging and informative narration with diverse sentence structures and vocabulary. IBM iX experts collaborated with the All England Club to train AI in the language of tennis, as stated in IBM’s official statement, to produce this commentary.
The AI-powered commentary is coming to post-match highlights on wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon app, not the complete coverage. The first round of AI commentary will be available after Monday’s first day of play.
It is not the first time AI has been used for commentary in sports. In April, the US Masters golf tournament featured AI commentary.
The viewers can choose to toggle commentary on or off, if they prefer to hear natural sounds from the court, such as the ball hitting a racket and cheers from the crowd, they have that option available.
This year, another new feature called AI draw analysis has been introduced in tennis. It uses artificial intelligence to calculate a statistic determining the likelihood of each player’s path to the final in the singles draw.
Several factors, such as potential future opponents and the player’s position compared to their competitors, determine the player’s draw favorability rating.
This unique insight will allow tennis fans to discover surprises and anomalies in the singles draw that may not be apparent from player rankings alone.
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