ESPN Fantasy Football offers AI insights from IBM Watson to all players. (Photo by Melissa Rawlins / ESPN Images)
IBM’s Watson is supplying the ESPN fantasy football game with artificial intelligence-powered insights. The advanced Fantasy Insights system originally debuted last year but has been incorporated as a key resource for the 2018 season.
Developers at IBM trained Watson to understand the sport by giving it more than six million articles to read. The platform stays up to date by ingesting 3,000 new sources every hour. While NFL player statistics are already readily available to fantasy gamers, Watson is supplementing those raw numbers with “unstructured data.