It’s Game, Set, Match for Generative AI at Wimbledon 2023
The world’s oldest tennis tournament shows love for latest tech with new digital experience for fans
You can add generative AI to your strawberries and cream at Wimbledon 2023. This year, from July 3 through July 16, tennis fans will travel to the England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and gather in front of screens to enjoy the world’s most famous tournament.
Generative AI technology elevates the game at Wimbledon, enhancing fan experience.
Broadcast on television for 130 years, this year’s tournament will deliver technological firsts for match commentary with generative AI and a new player statistic with AI Draw Analysis by IBM. Fans using the Wimbledon app and wimbledon.com, will experience AI-served insights with match highlight commentary and statistical analysis for predictions of each player’s path to the single’s final.
IBM watsonx will spin the AI audio commentary with captions for video highlights packages covering matches outside Wimbledon’s Show Courts. Voiceovers will use the cloned voice of a British athletics commentator, Hannah England. Show Courts, where the key tournament matches take place, will continue with live human commentary by familiar experts like John McEnroe, Martina Navratalova, and others.
Development of these new AI solutions required teamwork by The All England Club, IBMiX, and IBM Consulting to leverage watsonx foundation models and IBM’s AI and data platform to train the AI to understand the unique language and vocabulary of tennis. Generative AI built on these models was applied to produce more engaging, informative, and varied sentence structure and vocabulary.
We’re among the fans anticipating the excitement of taking our royal box seats (at home) and on-the-go with our devices, to watch and listen as GenAI takes Centre Court to make the calls. We predict it will be a smash!
To read more on AI in sports and some of the ways computer vision provides deep baseball analytics, check out our post, Forget Big Data: Why Computer Vision Is the Next Moneyball.
Move Over Charlie McCarthy, AI Is No Dummy
Gamers can now speak to each with the AI-generated voices of alternative personas
Millions of gamers can speak with each other in voices other than their own while playing games. This week, to the delight of gamers everywhere, Voicmod released AI-generated characters that change their own voice to a selection of different voices, from young to old, and high-pitched to baritone. A breakthrough in conversational AI, delivering AI-generated voices in real time is challenging and compute intensive.
Used by more than 40 million people, Voicemod’s tech can be used by people in the social app Discord, where people can hang out and talk with friends and communities. Gamers can download the app and use the tech as a “virtual microphone” to speak through the alternative personas. Trained with professional voice actor voices, 20 new “AI-humans” are intended to make gaming more fun with a new way to communicate, socialize, and enjoy a greater sense of community belonging.
The company is working on other cutting edge projects including “watermarking” a solution to identify real and computer-generated voices. It’s also working on systems to ensure safe use of voice-changing technology.
AI’ll Be There For You. Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Ross, Joey, and My AI?
Snapchatters have a new generative AI chatbot friend
Snapchat released its newest feature this week, My AI, which places a chatbot into feeds. Originally planned as a subscription-only feature, on Wednesday Snapchat rolled out the feature globally to all Snapchatters regardless of whether they are subscribed or not. Sabrina Ortiz, ZDNet Associate Editor provides her thoughts on her My AI experience. Users can give the bots names, customize bitmoji avatars, and bring them into conversations. Just like ChatGPT, users can ask My AI questions, get recommendations, and converse. The company will be testing new ad delivery with My AI, with relevant sponsored links. For example if a user asks their chatbot for dinner recommendations, a sponsored ad for local restaurants or for food delivery services will display. Snapchat’s testing of this format may result in intriguing potential for social media companies and their monetization of generative AI features.
It seems that once My AI is activated, it can only be deleted from the feeds of premium subscribers. Snapchat users are complaining about the inconvenience and parents are voicing concerns about the potential risks. Among these are privacy and the fact that the My AI chatbot can sound very humanlike and casually interacts in conversations like a friend would. And something like human friends, the AI chatbot at times can exhibit strange behaviors.
Snapchat has warned users to beware of “hallucinations” and “deficiencies” that the AI chatbot may output in its responses. The company has also advised users not to share secrets with the chatbot as it will be storing conversations for improvement and review purposes.
We all know what can happen when Friends like Joey try to keep secrets.
About Plainsight
Plainsight dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of AI-powered computer vision across many verticals and enterprise use cases, including manufacturing, retail, food service, theft, and more. As companies automate their operations with AI and Agents, Plainsight brings vision capabilities to watch and analyze events in the real world and generate structured data for analytics and reporting. Headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, Plainsight Technologies operates as a distributed team, delivering cutting-edge solutions worldwide. To learn more, visit plainsight.ai.
