It’s about to be week 14 of the NFL season, and stakes and storylines abound across the league. In a new section of the Yahoo Sports app, Yahoo is hoping it can use AI to capture them all automatically. The company is launching a new feature called Game Breakdowns, which attempt to generate a snapshot of what’s interesting about a game — before, during, or after it’s been played.
Game Breakdowns, which for now are in beta and only for users who pay for Yahoo’s Fantasy Plus subscription, consist of three things. The first is a summary of the game, intended to capture both its most interesting stats and its biggest stories — not just typical box-score stuff, but whatever happens to be most interesting now. The second is a running stream of important plays, so you can catch up easily on the moments that mattered. The third is called Prompts, and includes several suggested follow-up questions (you can’t yet write your own) about what happened in the game. Everything on the page is generated by AI models, and is meant to update constantly as a game progresses.
Yahoo’s far from the first company to try and outsource game info to AI. ESPN, The Associated Press, and others have been doing so for a while, with varying levels of success. These recaps and previews are generally formulaic and straightforward, and include a lot of statistics — a combination of things actually well-suited to AI intervention. But Yahoo’s trying to go a little deeper, says Andrew Machado, the head of product for Yahoo Sports. “What are the things people would want to know that are not obvious?” he asks. In a demo, he shows me a game preview that includes injury updates on a star player (important for fantasy players!) and some historical context on the two teams’ offensive prowess. Another one shows a bunch of interesting stats, but misses the big story of the game: a much-watched player’s long-awaited debut.
This balance is hard to get right: AI models can mine historical stats with the best of ’em, but it’s not always capable of understanding the emotional, human-driven reasons people care about sports. For that, Machado says his team plans to rely both on Yahoo’s own journalists and its users to help train both the app and the Game Breakdowns about what really matters. There’s also a “Sources” portion of the breakdowns page that leads you to all this content, but that’s largely hidden behind the AI content.
The models also identify key plays in part by seeing what commenters are discussing during the game. “We’ve got all the signals of reactions,” Machado says, “and we’ve got all the signals of win percentage change. We’re just homing through the box score and slamming it all together into this.”
Going forward, Machado says, as the feature opens up to everyone and to other sports, Yahoo might begin to personalize the breakdowns to each user. It could shape the page based on what you find most interesting, the players you like, or even who’s on your fantasy team. For now, the tool just seems to really love an esoteric historical comparison — and a betting line.
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David Pierce
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