As part of its digital offering for tennis fans, the All England Lawn Tennis Club will employ generative AI from IBM Watson to produce commentary for men’s and ladies’ singles matches featured on the app and Wimbledon.com.
The AI Commentary feature will provide fans watching match highlights videos with audio commentary of key moments, along with captions, which they can toggle on or off, said IBM.
The tool has been designed to give fans a more insightful experience when catching up on key moments from matches with highlights videos on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com.
Its introduction this year is a step towards making commentary available in an exciting way for matches outside of Wimbledon’s Show Courts, which already have live human commentary, added the company.
To develop the new feature, experts from IBM iX, the experience design partner within IBM Consulting, worked with The All England Club to leverage foundation models from watsonx, IBM’s enterprise AI and data platform, to train the AI in the unique language of tennis.
Generative AI built on the foundation models was applied to produce narration with varied sentence structure and vocabulary to make the clips informative and engaging, added IBM.
Usama Al-Qassab, marketing and 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.”
