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The All England Club has teamed up with tech group IBM to leverage the boom in large language models such as ChatGPT to cover matches that would ordinarily be watched in silence.
Although Wimbledon has a reputation for favouring tradition over change, it’s set to follow a global trend this year in embracing artificial intelligence (AI) at the upcoming championships.
Teaming up with tech group IBM to offer AI-generated audio commentary and captions in its online highlights videos, the All England Club (AELTC) will deliver John McEnroe’s trademark cutting analysis via digital alternatives.
The service will be available on the Wimbledon app and website and be separate to the BBC’s tournament coverage in July.
It will use IBM’s watsonx platform, which has been trained in the ‘unique language of tennis’ with the help of the AELTC and has previously been used to provide features such as its player power index, which analyses performance.
Building on these foundational models and with the aim of making it sound as human as possible, IBM has successfully created a narration with varied sentence structure and vocabulary.
Another feature it’s offering alongside this is ‘draw analysis,’ which provides fans with an idea of the difficulty of each player’s route to the final.
The metric takes into account more obvious indicators such as world ranking and seeding, while also factoring in analysis of historic matchups between players or those between similar playing styles, recent injuries, grass record, and other potential anomalies.
According to IBM, it’s the first time such a stat has been created for the sport.
