At its invitation-only All-Star Technology Summit on Feb. 16 in Indianapolis, the NBA introduced something called NB-AI.
According to MSN.com, it is a prototype chatbot and voice assistant with potential for integration into the NBA app. It would enable users to ask for more information about the game they’re watching – which would liken it to the virtual reality (VR) that certain eyeglasses provide, overlaying text and icons onto the field of vision – or change the broadcast’s style. This second option is what a video released by the NBA shows.
In this video, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver – onstage with Victor “Wemby” Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs – asks NB-AI to show “the Pacers game as if it were a Spider-Man movie.” A big screen to the left shows the equivalent of a television broadcast of the Pacers game. The system “generates in real-time with the game” a computer-animated version of a fast break leading to a slam dunk and shows it on a big screen to the right.
The style is a parody of the print, rather than the movie, comic-book style, and it is unclear how “real” the real-time generation is. Insofar as the onstage dialogue appears to be scripted, the Spider-Man version of the Pacers game could be an idealization worked out for the Tech Summit. The question is, would Pacers fans want to watch an entire Pacers game like this? And how free would users be to name their style?
The Tech Summit had all-time great Larry Bird on hand along with Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz and held panel discussions on engaging “content” (“The Attention Wars”), the future of the “fan experience” (”Dream Stream”), AI (“The AI Revolution”) and technology in medicine (“The Promise of Preventive Health”).
