AI commentary service set to make high-quality natural language updates available for all top-tier cricket matches

LONDON: CricViz, the world’s leading cricket data and analytics provider, has announced the launch of their new AI-powered cricket commentary. The first-of-its-kind commentary tool builds on CricViz’s expertise in cricket data analytics and enriches the data collected by CricViz to provide vibrant ball-by-ball updates.

The AI commentary goes beyond a simple description of each ball and uses CricViz’s enhanced data collection and proprietary metrics such as WinViz and Player Impact scores to tell the story of the game. Over time, the system will be expanded to include a broader set of data linked to other fan engagement tools, such as fantasy games.

On average, the live commentary service generates approximately 500 quadrillion combinations of narrative content for every 5-minute period of action. A consumer of the live cricket commentary would need to read many lifetimes worth of matches before they see an over described the same way twice.

CricViz has partnered with AI specialists, frog.ai to develop the tool, using machine learning and its proprietary Natural Language Generation platform to create a commentary from CricViz’s ball-by-ball data. The end result is a compelling commentary service that can free up media or journalism staff to do other things.

With CricViz enhanced commentary, teams can provide fans with ball-by-ball, engaging updates to help fans follow the game in real time. Using the power of AI, CricViz’s new commentary system will be able to cover hundreds of games simultaneously and opens the possibility of creating a professional standard of live commentary for games played at every level, from the World Cup Final through to schools cricket.

Matt Lovering, Managing Director for CricViz said, “We are delighted to harness the power of AI to launch the next generation of automated cricket commentary. The new service will immediately make the experience of following a game online better, and creates the opportunity to expand live ball-by-ball updates to thousands of cricket games around the world.”

David Hipkin, co-founder of frog.ai said, “Cricket’s myriad of analytics presents a wonderful opportunity for the frog.ai proprietary technology to create nuanced, unique and compelling real-time sports commentary. I am proud to announce this partnership.”

CricViz is partnering with leading cricket publisher, Wisden, who will showcase the service during the Men’s and Women’s Ashes and plan to use it to broaden their coverage of domestic and international games worldwide.

Ian Sykes, Managing Director of Wisden said, “CricViz is the market leader in cricket data analysis, and continues to be the perfect partner for Wisden.com as we enter into our seventh year working together. The new AI-powered commentary is another great example of the CricViz team staying ahead of the curve and illustrates how their technology perfectly complements Wisden’s heritage. We are excited to see where the scaling up of this service will take our digital offering and look forward to this and CricViz’s future innovations playing a critical part in helping Wisden deliver first-class cricket content to fans all over the world.”

About CricViz

CricViz, part of Ellipse Data, was founded in 2015 to harness the power of data and analytics to make cricket better for everyone. CricViz combines the world’s most extensive cricket database with unique predictive models and the deep expertise of our team of data scientists, programmers and analysts. This allows us to provide unrivalled analysis and insight to cricket clients worldwide.

In supplying governing bodies, broadcasters, professional teams and media, CricViz offers a unique analytical service to tell data-driven stories.

For more information on CricViz please visit www.cricviz.com

Nitin Jain