Wimbledon to see AI-generated audio commentary and captions this year

For its July 3 – July 16 tournament, Wimbledon will be introducing AI-powered commentary to its coverage. The All England Club and IBM will be working together to offer AI-generated audio commentary and captions in its online highlights videos.

The service will be separate to the BBC’s coverage for the tournament and will be available on the Wimbledon mobile application and website. It will use the tech group’s WatsonX AI platform, which has been trained with the help of the club in the “unique language of tennis”.

In fact, IBM’s AI technology is already helping the All England Club with certain engaging features such as its player power index, which analyses player performance.

A Potential Move Towards AI-generated Commentary On Full Matches

The coverage this time will also include AI-powered analysis of singles draws, examining how favourable a player’s path to the final might be. Things that would not be apparent by looking at just the player’s ranking, such as anomalies and potential surprises in the singles draw, can be uncovered through the new insight, IBM mentioned.

Data is collected from a variety of sources around the court. The information, which includes tracking data for the players, tracking data for the ball, and the type of shots the players make, is then fed into IBM’s platform, where AI models process it before eventually using it in a chatbot-style system that produces natural language commentary.

The commentary, which follows the language of tennis and Wimbledon, can also be fed into a second text-to-speech AI to convert it into audio commentary in near-real-time.

It seems these changes are a move towards AI-generated commentary on full matches.

This month, the European broadcasting union announced that commentary for the European Athletics Championships will be provided by a cloned voice of the commentator Hannah England. The cloned voice will serve the European Athletics YouTube channel.