The Championships, Wimbledon is introducing artificial intelligence-powered commentary to its coverage for the 2023 edition of the iconic tennis tournament.
The All England Club has partnered with tech group IBM to offer AI-generated audio commentary and captions in its online highlights videos.
The feature will be available for fans following the tournament on the Wimbledon website and app, providing audio commentary and captions of key moments, which can be toggled on and off. This will be separate to the BBC’s UK coverage.
“We are constantly innovating with our partners at IBM to provide Wimbledon fans, wherever they are in the world, with an insightful and engaging digital experience of The Championships.“
Usama Al-Qassab, The All England Club
The commentary will use IBM’s watsonx AI platform, which has been trained in the ‘unique language of tennis’ with the help of the All England Club, which already uses IBM’s AI technology to provide features such as its player power index, which analyses player performance.
The coverage will also include AI-powered analysis of singles draws, examining how favourable a player’s path to the final might be.
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.
Usama Al-Qassab, Marketing & Commercial Director, The All England Club, said, “We are constantly innovating with our partners at IBM to provide Wimbledon fans, wherever they are in the world, with an insightful and engaging digital experience of The Championships.
“This year, we’re introducing new features for our digital platforms that use the latest AI technology from IBM to help fans gain even more insight into the singles draw and access commentary on a wider variety of matches through our match highlights videos.”
Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for IBM, added, “IBM is bringing new layers of insight and engagement to the 2023 Championships through the use of innovative new tools, powered by foundation models and generative AI from watsonx. We’ve seen first-hand how these technologies have the power to help major sporting events like Wimbledon to grow their audiences through outstanding digital experiences.
“The AI and data platform that IBM is using to create unique fan experiences for Wimbledon is the same technology that we’re using to drive business transformation with clients across all sectors and industries.”
IBM said the move was a step towards generating AI commentary on full matches, which is already beginning in other sports.
It has recently been revealed that a cloned voice of the commentator Hannah England will be used to provide commentary for the European Athletics Championships, with her voice replicating the content of the event’s live blog for commentary on the European Athletics YouTube channel.
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