IBM Enhances Wimbledon Digital Experience with AI

IBM and The All England Lawn Tennis Club announced new features for the Wimbledon digital fan experience that will launch at this year's Championships. A new AI feature will produce tennis commentary for all video highlights packages during Wimbledon and in a first for tennis, the IBM AI Draw Analysis feature will also provide a new statistic to define how favorable the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw.

The new features expand on the suite of digital tools for fans on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com. They are the latest examples of how IBM and Wimbledon are using technology to help fans engage with The Championships on a deeper level.

The new 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. The tool will give fans a more insightful experience when catching up on key moments from matches with highlights videos. 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.

To develop the new feature, experts from IBM iX 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.

Another new feature IBM will introduce this year is the AI Draw Analysis, the first statistic of its kind in tennis, which uses AI to define how favorable the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw. A player's draw favourability will be indicated with a rating along a scale, based on factors including the player's match-ups against potential future opponents and how the player's position in the draw compares to competitors. This new insight will help tennis fans to uncover anomalies and potential surprises in the singles draw, which would not be apparent by looking only at the players' ranking, inspiring more debate and engagement in the fan community.

The new features will add to the suite of AI-powered digital tools for fans available on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com. They include the Power Index Leaderboard, Match Insights, and Personalised Highlights Reels and Recommendations. Using over 100,000 data points from every shot played across the tournament, analyzed by IBM's Watson AI technology on IBM Cloud, these digital features are designed to make it easier for fans to understand which players to follow, how they compare to their opponents, and who's likely to win.