Enhancing ESPN’s Game Recaps for Underserved Sports Using AI

ESPN has a long history of embracing and experimenting with emerging technologies, and a new initiative will mark its first experimentation with AI-generated content.

Beginning this week, ESPN plans to utilize AI technology to produce text game recap stories of select sports events, which will appear on ESPN digital platforms (ESPN.com, ESPN App). 

WHAT’S NEW?

Using generative AI technology, ESPN will provide fans with incremental game recap stories for the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) and National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). The added coverage will augment existing coverage, and the initiative will extend to some other sports in the future.

The AI-generated recaps aim to enhance coverage of under-served sports, providing fans with content that was previously unavailable. These sports do not currently have game recaps on ESPN digital platforms, and these AI-generated recaps will be a tool to augment existing coverage – not replace it. 

QUALITY AND TRANSPARENCY

Each AI-generated recap will be reviewed by a human editor to ensure quality and accuracy. Additionally, content created by AI will be clearly indicated for fans, via the byline – “ESPN Generative AI Services” – at the top of each recap and with a tagline at the bottom of each story: “ESPN Generative AI Services creates recaps from event data and/or transcripts that are reviewed by human editors before posting; email [email protected] for corrections.”

At launch, ESPN will leverage Microsoft AI technology with a training process, prompts, and requirements specific to this initiative that have been collaboratively developed by ESPN and Disney teams, along with Accenture. 

WHY?

This innovation project was incubated through the ESPN Edge Innovation Center as an initiative that reflects ESPN’s commitment to embracing emerging technologies to drive innovation as a purposeful, responsible experimentation with AI technology.

The aim is to learn, determine how to responsibly leverage new technology, and begin to establish best practices – all while augmenting our existing coverage of select sports and allowing ESPN staff to focus on their more differentiating feature, analysis, investigative, and breaking news coverage.

WHEN TO EXPECT IT

Fans can expect to see AI-generated recaps beginning this weekend – Friday, Sept. 6, for NWSL and Saturday, Sept. 7, for PLL, including summaries for all past games this season. Fans will find these new recaps on ESPN.com and the ESPN app through index pages, game pages, and “Recap” buttons on select scoreboard pages.

CHAIRMAN, ESPN, JIMMY PITARO ON AI’S POTENTIAL BENEFITS TO SPORTS INDUSTRY, FANS

During ESPN Media Day on Aug. 28, 2024, in Bristol, Conn., Chairman, ESPN, Jimmy Pitaro spoke about the benefits of AI technology for ESPN and sports fans:

“AI is not the awful, terrible disruptor that many people think it will be. I personally believe that AI will be very helpful and beneficial to the sports industry and sports fans, and we’re starting to see that.

“Just some examples today. Highlights at scale. Again, I keep talking about studio and SportsCenter and digital, the ability to clip and generate highlights at scale. I’m not talking about NFL highlights. I’m talking about highlights from Ivy League lacrosse.

“All this content that we have, these live games that we have, on ESPN+, for example. You get to a point where hiring more people to cut highlights is not efficient.
 
“Number Two, we’ve talked a lot about personalized SportsCenter. [Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company] Bob Iger even mentioned it on an earnings call.

“When we launch Flagship, the idea will be, and I can’t commit to this, but we are thinking about, around that time, we would have a personalized SportsCenter. So, AI will obviously help significantly in terms of that, not just in terms of the personalization and the clip generation, but also the narration.

“And we saw this coming out of the [2024 Paris Summer] Olympics with NBC, in terms of what they were able to generate, which I thought was quite good, actually.

“Text-to-speech and speech-to-text. So, closed captioning. Same issue. How do we do closed captioning at scale? AI is already helping us significantly there.

“I commute. I drive myself to Bristol every day. It’s an hour’s drive for me each way. And I want to consume our long-form reporting, our investigative reporting, which is super high quality. Having the ability to just click play and hear the narration of a long-form investigative story is incredibly valuable to me as a commuter.

Those are some examples of how we see this as nothing but positive for the sports fan and for the business.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Flagship is ESPN’s direct-to-consumer streaming service launching in Fall 2025.