IBM and the All-England Lawn Tennis Club have announced new features for the Wimbledon digital fan experience that will be launched at this year’s championship.

They include:

A new artificial intelligence feature, using generative AI technology from IBM Watsonx, will produce tennis commentary for all video highlights packages during Wimbledon.
In a first for tennis, the IBM AI draw analysis will also provide a new statistic to define how favourable the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw.

The new features expand on the suite of digital tools in the Wimbledon app and on wimbledon.com – the latest examples of how IBM and Wimbledon are using technology to improve fans’ engagement with the tournament.

The new AI commentary feature will provide match highlights videos with audio commentary of key moments, plus captions they can toggle on or off. 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.

Experts from IBM iX, a design company in IBM Consulting, worked with the All-England Lawn Tennis Club to leverage foundation models from Watsonx, IBM’s enterprise AI and data platform, training 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 IBM AI draw analysis – the first statistic of its kind in tennis – which uses AI to define how likely the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw.

Draw favourability

A player’s draw favourability will be indicated with a rating along a scale, based on factors including the player’s matchups against potential future opponents and how the player’s position in the draw compares to competitors.