Through new, innovative uses of artificial intelligence, Baidu has created a personal assistant which produced machine generated, real-time commentaries for the recently finished Olympic basketball games in Rio. The assistant is named Duer and it can give live commentaries in natural languages alongside GIF’s and specific user comments. The personal assistant which was launched in September of 2015 doesn’t just announce basketball games, it’s also used to book restaurants and order takeout along with many other things.
Duer learned to give running commentary by analyzing thousands of hours of NBA basketball games as well as 2012 games from the London Olympics. The large amounts of data collected over this time tends to serve fans well, said Wu Tian, the Senior Director of Baidu’s Natural Language Processing Team. “Sports broadcasting usually relies on statistics and analysis of a large volume of data for both matches and players which can be a strength of AI (artificial intelligence) against a human being.”
Another one of the greatly beneficial aspects of Duer is the ability for fans to get questions answered mid-game. If a fan is interested in a specific player, Duer can provide commentary on just that player.
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As with any new technology, there are certain things that Baidu researchers are working on in order to improve Duer’s ability. One of a sports broadcaster’s biggest responsibilities is being looked upon to call “big moments” in games. For example, during the Rio Olympics, Carmelo Anthony made a three-point shot with one minute and 11 seconds left in the first quarter during a game against Australia. The three-pointer put Anthony ahead of LeBron James for the highest scoring American player during Olympic basketball games with 276 points. Luckily, according to Tian, Duer was able to share this anecdote with the audience as soon as it happened.
Duer also doesn’t necessarily have to work alone. “Duer live broadcasting has been very well received,” said Tian. “It broadcasted the basketball quarterfinals with China’s star commentator, Yang Yi on live TV.”
Tian says that Yang spoke very highly of Duer’s commentary skills, saying that it was quick and knowledgeable along with having a sense of humor to make it more human-like.
In the future, Baidu will focus on applying Duer’s commentary to games that most closely resemble basketball such as volleyball, tennis and ping pong. Tian explained that for more complex sports like gymnastics and diving it may take a different approach.
“AI is making profound impacts on our society,” said Tian. “As the technology progresses, it will become an indispensable pillar for live sports commentary in the future.”