Yahoo’s Game Breakdowns feature provides AI recaps and previews of NFL games

It’s almost Week 14 of the NFL season, and stakes and stories abound across the league. And in a new section of the Yahoo Sports app, Yahoo hopes to be able to use artificial intelligence to automatically capture all these photos. The company is launching a new feature called Game Breakdowns, which attempts to create a snapshot of what’s interesting in the game — before, during, or after playing it.

The Game Breakdowns feature, which is now in beta and is only for users who pay for Yahoo’s Fantasy Plus subscription, consists of three things. The first is a summary of the game, meant to capture its most interesting stats and biggest stories – not just the typical box-score stuff, but everything that gets more interesting now. The second option is a constant stream of important plays, so you can easily follow the important moments. The third is called prompts, and includes several suggested follow-up questions (you can’t write your own yet) about what happened in the game. Everything on the page is generated by AI models, and is meant to be constantly updated as the game progresses.

Yahoo isn’t the first company to try to capture game information for artificial intelligence. ESPN, The Associated Press, and others We’ve been doing this for a whilewith varying levels of success. These summaries and previews are generally clear and straightforward, and include a lot of statistics – a range of things well suited to AI intervention. But Yahoo is trying to dig a little deeper, says Andrew Machado, head of product at Yahoo Sports. “What are the things people want to know but aren’t obvious?” he asks. In the demo, he showed me a game preview that included injury updates on a star player (important for fantasy players!) and some historical context on both teams’ offensive prowess. The latest shows off a bunch of interesting stats, but misses the big story of the game: the debut of a long-awaited and highly-followed player.

It’s a difficult balance to get right: AI models can extract historical statistics to the best of their ability, but they’re not always able to understand the emotional, human reasons why people care about sports. That’s why Machado says his team plans to rely on Yahoo’s journalists and users to help coach both the app and Game Breakdowns on what really matters. There’s also a ‘Sources’ part on the details page that leads you to all this content, but that’s largely hidden behind the AI ​​content.

Models also determine key plays in part by seeing what commentators discuss during the game. “We have all the reaction signals, we have all the signals of the change in winning percentage,” Machado says. “We just focus on the penalty area score and put everything together in that.”

Going forward, Machado says, with the feature open to everyone and other sports, Yahoo may start customizing the details for each user. They can shape the page based on what you find most interesting, players you like, or even people on your fantasy team. For now, the tool seems to love the esoteric historical comparison – and the betting line.