What is Wimbledon AI commentary? How it works
All the details about how AI commentary works at Wimbledon in 2023.
Artificial intelligence – AI – is the buzzword of the moment, it's taking the world by storm and it has found a place at Wimbledon in the form of groundbreaking AI commentary.
IBM – data partners of Wimbledon and the All England Club – have crafted a tool that can apply AI-generated commentary to highlights reels of all the biggest matches at The Championships.
We visited the data bunker at the All England Club to check out how the brand new, exciting technology looks set to revolutionise sport coverage now, and in the future.
RadioTimes.com brings you all the details about the AI commentary being used at Wimbledon 2023.
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What is AI commentary?
To develop the new feature, experts from IBM iX, the experienced 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 these foundation models was applied to produce narration with varied sentence structure and vocabulary to make the clips informative and engaging.
Essentially, while the technology is still in its relatively fledgling stages, it has been trained to read tennis matches. It is able to determine aspects of shots, such as the type of shot and who wins each point with an increasing vocabulary of tennis terms and descriptors to colour the action.
For more Wimbledon features, check out: Wimbledon FAQs, facts and figures | Who has won Wimbledon the most times? | How does Wimbledon Hawk-Eye work?
From this data, the tool can generate AI text commentary which can then translated into full audio commentary.
In its early stage, the AI commentary tool has been applied to Wimbledon highlights on their official website, and can be toggled on or off via the highlights video player.
The technology is particularly useful at Wimbledon because there are only human commentators for matches on show courts. AI commentary means that non-show court matches can be brought to life in highlight reels.
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Authors
Michael Potts is the Sport Editor for Radio Times, covering all of the biggest sporting events across the globe with previews, features, interviews and more. He has worked for Radio Times since 2019 and previously worked on the sport desk at Express.co.uk after starting his career writing features for What Culture. He achieved a first-class degree in Sports Journalism in 2014.
