On 21 June 2023, IBM and the All England Lawn Tennis Club announced that the year’s Championships would feature AI-generated commentary built on IBM’s watsonx platform. The feature produced audio narration, with optional captions, over match highlight videos on the Wimbledon app and website, turning silent clips into narrated packages without a human commentator recording each one.
To make the narration sound like tennis rather than generic sports talk, IBM’s iX team worked with the club to adapt watsonx foundation models to the specific vocabulary and phrasing of the game, generating narration with varied sentence structure so clips did not all read the same way. The same announcement introduced an AI Draw Analysis feature that rated how favorable each player’s path through the singles draw was - described as the first statistic of its kind in tennis. The underlying digital experience already analyzed over 100,000 data points from shots across the tournament.
The Wimbledon work is a visible early deployment of large language models in live broadcast media: low-stakes enough to tolerate the occasional awkward phrasing, but a genuine production use of generative text-to-speech narration at scale during a major event.