Wimbledon’s AI assistant can answer questions and provide winner predictions

The AI-powered tool could tell you everything you need to know about the game in real time.

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and its partner IBM have revealed several AI-powered features for this year’s event.

This year, Wimbledon will start on June 30th. During the tournament, users of the Wimbledon app and website will be able to use “Match Chat,” an interactive assistant powered by generative AI that will answer various questions asked by tennis fans.

Users can ask their own questions or use pre-written prompts about a certain match. The questions could relate to things like who won the most points, who performed better in the tournament, or similar topics.

The assistant is powered by IBM’s Watsonx AI platform and its Granite large language model (LLM), which makes it stand out from other AI-powered assistants because it’s trained on tennis terminology.

For now, the assistant is only available for men’s and women’s singles matches, which is a test to see how many people would use the tool before it is extended to other Wimbledon formats.

The digital products lead at the AELTC, Chris Clements, said that he expects this to be an engaging experience for many people and that it will help the company understand what users are interested in based on their questions.

IBM has also updated another tool, “Likelihood to Win.” This feature provides users with analysis based on player statistics, expert insights, and the possible win percentage.

The feature turned out to be a great starter for debate among the fans online.

While Wimbledon and IBM have been collaborating for more than thirty years, in recent years, they’ve focused on AI and how to employ it to create new experiences for the fans, reports Sports Pro.

Last year, they introduced the “Catch Me Up” feature, which provides personalized action of the day’s play. In 2023, Gen AI provided users with spoken commentary introducing match highlights.

The initial goal of Wimbledon and IBM is to provide users with more personalised digital experiences.