In baseball banter everywhere from bleacher seats to barrooms everywhere in between, home runs are celebrated as homers, dingers, bombs and long balls. The pinstriped uniforms of New York’s American League team may say Yankees, but the club is often known as the Yanks, the Bronx Bombers and — now that Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez and friends have joined the lineup — the Baby Bombers, too.
When Major League Baseball Advanced Media set about implementing a voice-activated command for its bestselling app — the Ask At Bat featured debuted this postseason — there was a concerted effort to retain the sport’s rich and colloquial vernacular. Not only can a user ask if Judge set the Yankees’ rookie record for home runs but also who holds the Bronx Bombers’ rookie record for dingers. To retrieve information about the National League Championship Series, one can invoke not just the Los Angeles Dodgers but the Azul or the Blue Crew, who are playing the Chicago Cubs, Cubbies and North Siders. There are 15 variations, synonyms and nicknames that are accepted for the Yankees.
“We want to capture the fun,” MLBAM senior vice president for mobile product development Chad Evans said. “For this to be a great product, it can’t just be factual. It really needs to capture that spirit of the sport. We want people to be able to talk to it the way they might talk to a friend, and understanding language is really important there.”
As voice command technology has improved across the marketplace in recent years through Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home, MLBAM has begun using these tools to develop its feature for At Bat. The product of that work is now available in beta mode this postseason for basic statistical requests, with plans for collecting fan feedback and user queries to enhance the product over the offseason for a full rollout next spring.
“Our mission has been to deliver the most relevant, timely information to fans, regardless of where they are and what they’re doing on a mobile device,” MLBAM SVP for wireless Adam Ritter said, adding: “The bot is the evolution of that delivery of content, just using something that people are becoming more accustomed to, which is using their voice as an input method.”
The machine learning and artificial intelligence ecosystem has changed dramatically in the last three years, Evans said, enabling MLBAM to build the necessary platform for natural language processing to really understand the user’s intent in asking questions.
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Depending on the complexity of the query, Ask At Bat will reply either with the answer itself or a deep link further into the app. One example: Who hit the most long balls in the 1972 Fall Classic? Ask At Bat can return the answer (Gene Tenace, four) that otherwise could take as many as eight layers of menus and filters.
“What’s great about voice as a method of interaction is that it’s really good for answering complex queries that would take lots and lots of clicks to build in the app,” Evans said.
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Down the road, users will be able to search for news related to players and teams using Ask At Bat. Long term, MLBAM plans to explore commercial uses. “How can I buy Jose Altuve’s jersey?” or “Are there grandstand tickets available to the Dodgers’ June 16 game?” Voice alone may not be the answer, Evans noted, suggesting that voice may be a helpful way of skipping a few complicated steps before the user resorts to a more traditional, manual method of, for instance, selecting the exact tickets he or she wants.
“We don’t want to just do voice because we can,” he said. “We want to do voice in a way that’s right for our fans.”