IBM and Wimbledon’s Catch Me Up cards to give personalised write-up for every singles tennis player in 2024’s Championships

IBM and The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), home of the Wimbledon Championships, will use generative AI to create personalised player stories in 2024.

These mini “Catch Me Up” cards aim to bring fans instantly up to date with players. They might be familiar names or someone you’ve never heard of before, with every player in the Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Singles draw covered.

“[Catch Me Up] uses generative AI to produce player-based updates, which essentially give a short-form summary of what the latest is for that player’s progress through the Championships,” said Chris Clements, Digital Products Lead at Wimbledon, at a pre-tournament briefing attended by TechFinitive.

“This is personalised to the individual, so we’re going to calculate what country they’re coming from, who their current favourite players are, who are the top ranked players, and it produces content which allows people to come in [and] very quickly pick up on all the storylines,” he added.

Catch Me Up uses IBM’s Granite large language model, trained using historic data, Wimbledon’s editorial style and “trusted external data sources like Sportradar” explained Kevin Farrar, Head of Sports Partnerships at IBM UK.

IBM and the AELTC are also using generative AI to provide match previews and post-match reviews across the tournament, including wheelchair events. These and the Catch Me Up cards can be accessed from the Wimbledon 2024 app or from Wimbledon.com, with The Championships running from 1 to 14 July 2024.

Example Wimbledon Catch Me Up cards

In example cards, based on information from just prior to last year’s tournament, Catch Me Up had this to say about Carlos Alcaraz:

“Carlos Alcaraz, the world No. 1, faces Jeremy Chardy in the first round of Wimbledon 2023. Alcaraz, known for his explosive style and powerful groundstrokes, is heavily favored against the veteran Chardy with an IBM Likelihood to win of 85%. Expectations are high for Alcaraz to make a deep run in the tournament, showcasing his potential on grass.”

Note the American spelling – and the fact that Alcaraz went on to win Wimbledon last year.

Also note that this is one snapshot in time. If you want more information about Alcaraz then you can ask for more. Likewise, as he goes deeper into the tournament, the Catch Me Up information will be constantly updated.

Why has Wimbledon introduced Catch Me Up?

Every year, The All England Lawn Tennis Club and IBM team up to develop new features for Wimbledon.com and the official Wimbledon apps. This is part of a long-standing partnership that dates back to 1990.

“Wimbledon is an event that people who don’t follow sport at all at any point in the year will still engage with and they’ll still be coming to our platforms,” said Chris Clements.

“We looked at what are the pain points for those people and what are the barriers of them being able to engage fully with our with our event,” he said.

Although Catch Me Up will have human oversight to make sure that it’s producing valid results, it allows the AELTC to cover many more players than would be possible if human writers tapped every single word. “[Catch Me Up] enables us to start telling some of those stories that wouldn’t otherwise be told,” said Clements.

“This year, we’re looking at the Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ singles, and every player will feature on these cards,” said IBM’s Farrar. “But you can see this opens up the door to creating stories that are unfolding across the whole tournament. So the Juniors, the Seniors, the Under 14s, the wheelchair players…”

He added: “Great stories are unfolding there that the content team might not be able to get to because they only have so much capacity. So this is about complementing the output that’s being generated by the humans and just giving the ability for more stories to be told about the whole tournament.”

What happened to last year’s AI commentary?

We asked a spokesperson what would happen to the AI commentary for clips introduced last year. The answer: it has been quietly shelved.

Although the idea of automatically generated commentary for video clips sounds great, last year’s results lacked any personality and added little to the experience.

It turns out that adding mundane commentary, that lacks the flavour of real commentary from experts, doesn’t solve fans’ pain points. But at least that’s good news for the hundreds of sports presenters who will descend on Wimbledon this year.