Through an innovative voice recognition project, every conversation onboard the national teams’ F50 catamarans will be tracked, transcribed and translated in real time to provide race analytics, ensure compliance and extend fan engagement
Background
SailGP is an international sailing sports league established in 2018 and headquartered in London and San Francisco. The fan-centric inshore racing takes place in some of the most iconic harbors around the globe and culminates with a $1 million winner-take-all race. National teams from ten different countries battle it out in identical supercharged F50 catamarans, engineered for intense racing at electrifying speeds exceeding 50 knots (nearly 60 mph/100 kph).
SailGP partnered with Acronis in 2020 to develop a unique voice recognition system to allow athlete conversations to be heard and shared in real time to extend fan engagement and to use that data to ensure team compliance and improve safety.
Acronis has a well-established team of machine intelligence (MI) engineers who developed an innovative active protection technology that can detect zero-day cyberattacks and block ransomware. Acronis Cyber Protect, the only solution that natively integrates cybersecurity, data protection and management to protect endpoints, systems and data, is used by more than 50 major sports teams around the world. Acronis’ expertise in this area enabled it to work on additional machine intelligence projects which require real- time processing of large volumes of data. The SailGP real-time voice recognition project is one of the many cases where Acronis is involved in helping sports teams develop bespoke technology to achieve strategic goals. To this end, Acronis partnered with Rolos to gain additional expertise when working on MI projects with sports teams.
The Challenge
SailGP is striving to become the world’s largest racing series with a fan base across the globe. To achieve that goal, SailGP has been developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy that delivers exemplary, sustainable leadership and utilizes innovative technology to bring the race to fans, wherever they are, in their own language. During the first season, SailGP attracted more than 133,000 spectators and a broadcast audience of 247M through dedicated programming and TV news coverage. To increase fan engagement further, SailGP needed an easy solution to add athlete conversation snippets to visual images and translate conversations to different languages in real time.
Another challenge was to monitor athletes’ conversations to ensure compliance during the race. There are certain phrases and words that athletes are not permitted to use during the race, and there was a need for a system that would ensure and monitor that. In addition, the same system could be used to monitor conversations for certain “hot words” related to safety. Early detection of such words has great potential to prevent accidents and enable the crews to react promptly to potentially hazardous situations.
“The partnership with Rolos and Acronis helped us improve our award-winning broadcast production and use data to bring fans closer to the action while introducing them to SailGP’s high-speed world. It also allowed us to increase fan engagement, while promoting the sport worldwide.”
- Warren Jones, Chief Technology Officer SailGP
The solution
The solution developed by Rolos and Acronis is a unique Machine Intelligence voice recognition system that brings SailGP closer to its fans, offering them matchless insight into what it takes to race at the highest level on the world stage.
The new application features an intuitive user interface (UX) for race management and configurable options, allowing SailGP data engineers to specify the required components for each race with regards to each team, including an athlete lineup and a list of hot words to be monitored, filtered real-time and sent to a live TV broadcast where the actual race is streamed. It is a multitier and multirole cloud-based application, scalable, and accessible from anywhere in the world.
It also enabled SailGP to display not only athletes speech bubbles to TV broadcasts, but the speech of race commentators as well, allowing fans to fully experience and become part of action during live events. The application stores data from historical races and allows in-depth analytics combining multiple datapoints, as well as fully post-processing audio and speech from previous races in an offline mode.
Acronis has also developed an API engine for batch task automation and exporting data streams into other applications for further processing and integration. For example, the system allows users to select an individual athlete’s stream and add it to an external broadcasting system.
The benefits
SailGP is continually looking at ways to improve its award-winning broadcast production and use data to bring fans closer to the action while educating them about the high-speed world of SailGP. Being able to listen in on the key conversations — including tactical calls and race-winning, split-second decisions — will give fans a unique insight into what it takes to race at the highest level on the world stage. This will help SailGP increase fan engagement and promote the sport in different countries around the world. The voice recognition project is an important tool in the team data analysts’ armory as SailGP helps the teams to continually improve and gain a competitive edge while racing boats featuring identical design and technology.
Additionally, the detection of hot words has the potential to improve the safety of the sport and prevent incidents as well as to manage and control censorship of the speech that fans hear on TV broadcasts.