REDWOOD, CA -- An increasing number of professional athletes and amateur sports lovers are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their skills and experience.

As many tech companies are innovating AI algorithms and applying them in the sports field, the industry of AI in sports is projected to reach a value of over 19 billion U.S. dollars by 2030.

Alberto Rizzoli is the CEO of V7, an AI data platform that helps companies, including sports-related ones, use AI to identify everything from objects to behavior in video.

He said the number one reason for professional athletes using AI is for training.

"It can get to know you quite well, and if it observes your games, or your runs or your swims or whatever it might be for long enough, it's able to tell you maybe where do you differ compared to your teammates, where are you strongest and when are you strongest," he said.
Rizzoli also said clients who are investing big bucks in AI are the large professional sports teams that have massive budgets for winning. For them, even a five-percent improvement means a lot in games.

A mobile phone application designed for tennis called SwingVision has also applied AI algorithms for sports lovers.
Using an iPhone camera and neural engine, it keeps score and tracks the spin type, speed of shots and where they land.
"We have our AI algorithms that are processing the video in the real time, and we generate stats about the game. And then after you're done playing the match, you have a highlight reel of any point you want to see, any shot you want to see. It's all generated for you, so you could look at like, all of your longest rallies, your breakpoints, or like just your forehand errors," said Swupnil Sahai, CEO of SwingVision.
As its grand goal of democratizing pro sports experience for all athletes, SwingVision also has a function of line calling, which AI helps determine whether a shot is in or out the lines.

"Unless you are playing on center court in Wimbledon or something, you don't have anybody really calling the lines for you, all the way up to Division I tennis. You even have some of these like ATP Challenger events, or maybe they have just one linesman on one side of the court, who is like looking down the entire court. So it's crazy, like 99 percent of people don't have good officiating," Sahai said.
Sahai said SwingVision aims to bring its technology to other sports like pickleball, volleyball and baseball. Like many pioneers in the field, he believes AI has the potential to not only elevate the athlete, but ultimately the game.