IBM Watson Puts on the Football Gear for Fantasy Contact

October 2, 2020

Fantasy football fans will soon benefit from the power of machine learning just as golf, NASCAR, baseball, and other sports fans have. Neowin explains how “IBM Watson Integrated With ESPN Fantasy Football League To Drive Deeper Engagement With Fans” for an exclusive new feature.

Fantasy football is a game where players assemble an imaginary football team of real players and earn points from the players’ statistical performance and contribution on the field. Fantasy football players enter leagues through various apps, including the ESPN Fantasy Football app. ESPN hired IBM to utilize the Watson supercomputer to create the Trade Assistant. It is a new feature on the ESPN Fantasy Football app that allows users to make better and fairer trades. The new Trade Assistant with IBM Watson analyzes a player’s roster value, cost of losing them, and equity in the trade.

The new feature requires some heavy duty number crunching that only a super computer can conquer:

“At the heart of the feature will be the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of IBM Watson, which will help the assistant in removing potential bias and uncover new insights from unstructured data from a variety of sources. To do this, IBM Watson will comb through multiple sources including blogs, news articles, and podcasts, to extract insights on player stats and sentiments….The motivation behind this feature is to make the Fantasy Football app more engaging and competitive. “Over the years, we have worked with IBM to uniquely integrate the brand and Watson technology to enhance the fantasy player experience and drive deeper engagement with sports fans,” said Marco Forte, Senior Vice President, Disney Advertising Sales, calling the feature a new height in the relationship between ESPN Fantasy Football and IBM.”

Watson should make playing ESPN Fantasy Football more enjoyable for players, especially those who do not lose a bet with their friends. No onto the bigger argument: is fantasy football and other fantasy sports legalized gambling?

Whitney Grace, October 2, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under IBM Watson, Marketing, News

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.