IBM Brings New Generative AI Capabilities to Masters Digital Platforms
Powered by AI, Hole Insights, and Spanish-language storytelling, they seek to further connect fans to one of golfs most iconic events.
IBM and the Masters Tournament announced several new features coming to the Masters app and Masters.com digital experience for this year’s event.
Powered by the generative AI capabilities of watsonx, IBM’s data and AI platform, this year fans will have access to the shot-by-shot Hole Insights functionality, which offers detailed, data-driven projections and analysis for every hole on the course. In addition, IBM launched AI-enabled Spanish-language storytelling as an expansion of English functionality that debuted in 2023.
These new capabilities, the product of collaboration between IBM Consulting experts and the Masters digital team, aim to deliver a more personalized and engaging digital viewing experience for millions of golf fans around the world, following the action of the Masters Tournament on April 11-14.
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IBM Hole Insights, which joins the “Track Shots” experience on the 2024 website and mobile apps Masters.com, brings together natural language processing and structured data to generate detailed breakdowns of current and historical games, as well as anticipated game projections, around any hole, including:
- Data-driven summaries of how each hole has been played on a daily basis and during the 2024 Tournament (e.g., “The 14th hole was difficult today, with 25% of strokes resulting in bogies”).
- Projections of how each hole can be played, based on past and current performance data (e.g., “The 9th hole is predicted to be the third most difficult hole today”).
- Historical information on how each hole has been played, based on tournament data over eight years, including more than 170,000 shots, and the position of the ball in progress (e.g., “historically shots at this location have an 82% chance of resulting in a birdie”).
For the first time, with Hole Insights, fans can receive live tournament shot information directly on the Masters website.
IBM is also writing the next chapter of its AI sports storytelling with Spanish-language narration. IBM and the Masters first introduced AI storytelling last year, in English, to provide automated audio and captioned commentary in videos with highlights of every shot on every hole — approximately 20,000 over the course of the tournament.
Now, fans will have access to the same Spanish-language narration in both audio and subtitle form. Fans who follow the featured videos on the 2024 Masters app and website can use English and Spanish narration interchangeably and simultaneously, as they wish. For example, they can watch the tournament while using audio narration in English, with Spanish subtitles, and vice versa.
The engine behind this new feature is a combination of generative AI and large language models built in watsonx. Beyond simple translation from English to Spanish, a team of IBM engineers and subject matter experts, through a process known as few-take learning, trained the AI model to “understand” and “communicate” natively in Spanish to deliver authentic narration experiences with audio and subtitles to Spanish-speaking fans.
IBM colabora para construir modelos de IA en español líderes en el mundo
“The generative AI power of watsonx is enabling IBM and Augusta National Golf Club to co-create technology solutions that bring the magic of the Masters to millions of fans around the world,” said Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president of marketing and communications at IBM.
“From training and tuning, to monitoring and maintenance, watsonx manages the entire lifecycle of the AI models used to create features like AI Storytelling and Hole Insights. These are the same capabilities we’re applying to our work with companies across industries as they aim to build better customer service experiences, reach new levels of productivity, and make more informed, data-driven business decisions.”
For more than 25 years, the Masters has worked closely with IBM on its digital transformation journey, from design and user interface to back-end systems that transform Masters data into engaging and accessible golf insights .
Recently announced features such as Spanish-language AI storytelling and Hole Insights join IBM’s ongoing efforts to reimagine and deliver a world-class digital experience for millions of fans, from the launch of Masters.com in 1996 to the introduction of AI Highlights, Round in Three Minutes, My Group, Player Insights and Projections powered by IBM Watson technology.
The 88th Masters Tournament will be played April 11-14 at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, GA. To see IBM technology in action, visit Masters.com or the Masters app on your mobile device, available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.