🤝 IBM and the Masters are collaborating to enhance the digital fan experience, with the latest addition being the AI commentary solution that expands on the already popular MyGroup feature. This solution will provide detailed golf narration for over 20,000 video clips throughout the Tournament.
The Masters digital team collaborated with IBM iX, the experience design partner in IBM Consulting, to develop the AI commentary solution for the Tournament. The solution saves time and ensures consistency by automating the process of adding spoken commentary to video clips. The team leveraged multiple foundation models, including IBM Watson Text-to-Speech, to train the AI in the distinct language of golf at the Masters. Generative AI, built on foundation models, was then applied to create a narration that features diverse sentence structures and vocabulary, eliminating repetitive play-by-play iterations to produce informative and captivating clips.
đź’» IBM is bringing a new feature to the Tournament this year – hole-by-hole player predictions. To make this possible, the IBM Consulting team utilized AutoAI capabilities in IBM Watson Studio to train AI models, leveraging six years of Masters data comprising more than 120,000 golf shots to project a player’s score on each hole throughout the Tournament. These projections are updated after each hole’s completion, considering the player’s most recent performance. This innovative solution builds on the predictive intelligence of the popular Players Insights and Masters Fantasy Projections feature, which turns data into insights for viewers on the most exciting holes to watch for each golfer, low/high scores for all golfers, and projected Masters Fantasy points for each round.
🎙 Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for IBM, stated: ” We’re applying the same hybrid cloud, AI technology and IBM Consulting services that we use with clients across industries to bring an elevated digital experience to one of the most iconic sporting events in the world.”
AI-created highlights have been offered on the Masters digital platforms for several years. Data analytics and cloud-based audio and vision recognition technologies are used to create automated video packages from every hole at Augusta National. The addition of automated voice commentary is a huge step forward for applying this technology and a tangible benefit of how the much-hyped (perhaps justifiably so) generative AI will impact sport.
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