The next time you watch a highlight video of a fast rally or elegant backhand from a Wimbledon match, chances are you’ll hear commentary generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
In June, technology company IBM and The All England Club announced that generative AI technology from IBM watsonx, the company’s enterprise AI and data platform, will create tennis commentary for all video highlights packages during this year’s championship. . This means users will be able to listen to audio commentary of match highlight videos on the Wimbledon website and smartphone app.
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To develop this AI commentary, experts from IBM Consulting’s Experience Design Partner, IBM iX, worked with The All England Club to leverage Watsonx’s underlying model of tennis, according to an IBM statement. The AI was trained in a unique language. “We applied generative AI built on these foundational models to generate narrations using different sentence structures and vocabularies to make our clips informative and engaging….Introduced this year is a step forward in making commentary available in exciting ways at matches outside of Wimbledon as well, “a show court that already has live human commentary,” the statement added.
The underlying model is trained on a wide range of unlabeled datasets that can be used for a variety of tasks with minimal fine-tuning, according to the IBM Research explainer.
Another new feature introduced this year is IBM AI draw analytics. This is the first statistic of its kind in tennis, using AI to define how favorable each player’s path to the final is in a singles draw. The All England Club’s marketing and commercial director Usama Al-Kassab said in a press statement that these new features will allow fans to better understand singles draws and provide commentary on various matches through match highlight videos. said to help access
Another new feature introduced this year is IBM AI draw analytics. This is the first statistic of its kind in tennis, using AI to define how favorable each player’s path to the final is in a singles draw. (IBM/Wimbledon)
Wimbledon has always been one of the frontiers in technology-enabled sports competition. The contest has partnered with IBM on various innovations since his 1990s. For example, in 1991 radar technology was introduced to measure ball speed. In 2006, Grand Slam tournaments adopted Hawkeye, an electronic camera line calling system that is also popular in cricket as part of the Decision Review System (DRS).
But while re-evaluating decisions or overturning decisions with the help of technology is one thing, explaining the flow of play on a tennis court is another ballgame altogether.
“I used to enjoy AI-generated commentary in games like: FIFA. It is the voice of a famous commentator. Also, I was wondering if one day someone would record my voice and tweak it. Maybe it’s just the beginning. But I don’t know how many expressions you can hear in the AI commentary,” said a Kolkata-based commentator who has been involved in various football competitions in India and has provided Bangla commentary for some Premier League matches. Mr. RR Kaushik Varun who was in charge said.
Varun said AI-generated commentary could be crisp with minimal dialogue, no grammatical errors, good statistics, but match the emotion and connection of real-world commentary. said it would be difficult to “I don’t think so, never. On YouTube there are a lot of videos of the famous goal yell. The comment lines make it even more special. Shastri yelling it, or Peter Drury commentating a football game, that’s what makes commentary epic,” Varun adds. “I don’t know how far AI can go. Facial expressions and emotions will be lost… AI just speaks based on what it is given.”
Tennis isn’t the only sport on the path of AI commentary. In March, IBM also introduced AI-generated audio commentary for the Masters tournament, creating in-depth golf narration of more than 20,000 video clips during the tournament on the Masters app and website. The company also introduced hole-by-hole prediction, which predicts a player’s score on each hole throughout the tournament held in April.
In March, sports betting company Oddset, in partnership with Stockholm-based telecom agency Perfect Fools, used OpenAI’s GPT3 language model to create an immersive audio commentary for football fans called “Dreams of Europe.” You have created a campaign. As part of this campaign, which includes 32 unique tracks, fans can listen to his AI-generated radio commentary of their favorite Swedish football teams competing in the Swedish Cup from the comfort of their bed. I was. GPT3 was trained on each team’s player data. Overall, an AI model was generated. 192 match commentaries, 2.9 million words, and over 17,000 minutes of audio content.
FILE: Spain’s Rafael Nadal reacts as the scoreboard displays the results of the hawk-eye challenge during points against Russia’s Karen Khachanov, Day 5 of the 2017 Wimbledon Championships, men’s singles third round. (AFP)
But will AI-generated comments ever feel realistic and natural? may be affected. Many industries, including advertising, automotive, assistive services, and mental health apps, are already deploying emotion AI to measure, understand, and respond to human emotions.
It remains to be seen whether cameras will be able to capture Novak Djokovic roaring on Center Court, feed that image into an AI model system, and convert it to text and audio for a realistic presentation to the crowd. Adjust the time according to the excitement and emotions of the human commentator.
Some small changes are in progress.As AFP According to reports earlier this week, the men’s ATP Tour in April will move from 2025 to electronic line calls, a role traditionally played by on-court linesmen, to “optimize accuracy and consistency across tournaments.” Announced that it will be introduced throughout the tour. .
All England Club Technology Director Bill Jinks said: AFP Line judges will also participate in Wimbledon this year. “There will definitely be line judges in 2023,” Jinx reportedly said in his report. “The line call technology has changed. We use a challenge system (players can query a limited number of calls. Video technology). He has been in place since 2007 and still works. No one knows what will happen in the future.”
Also read: Notes on this issue: It’s Wimbledon, it’s special
