Al-generated commentary: a new ball game

Al-generated commentary is coming to Wimbledon. But can it match the feel and emotions of real-life commentators?

- Nitin Sreedhar

Chances are the next time you watch video highlights of a fast rally or an elegant backhand from a Wimbledon match, the commentary you hear would have been generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In June, the technology company IBM and the All England Club announced that generative AI technology from IBM watsonx the company's enterprise AI and data platform-would produce tennis commentary for all video highlight packages during the Championships this year. That means users will now hear such audio commentary for match highlight videos on the Wimbledon website and smartphone app.

To develop this AI commentary, experts from IBM iX, the experience design partner in IBM Consulting, worked with the All England Club to leverage foundation models from watsonx to train AI in the unique language of tennis, according to a statement from IBM. "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.... 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," the statement adds.

An IBM Research explainer says foundation models are trained on a broad set of unlabelled data that can be used for different tasks, with minimal fine-tuning.