IBM Watson will help ESPN Fantasy Football players make better trades.
With the 2021 NFL season just one week away, ESPN and IBM have announced a slate of new features designed to help fantasy football players create better trade packages. The Trade Assistant with IBM Watson tool has long helped ESPN Fantasy Football players but now IBM Watson’s AI technology will help users create “customizable and simplified trade packages,” IBM explained. The new features were officially unveiled on September 3 for ESPN Fantasy Football users through the ESPN Fantasy App on iOS and Android. Within the ESPN Fantasy Football app, trades will be easier to understand for users and trade packages will be suggested based on your personalized “Players of Interest” watch list. Watson will also let users know what players they should, and should not, trade during the season as well as which positions to trade and trade for. Users will also see “No Brainer” trade suggestions built to help less experienced players by providing more straightforward trade recommendations. Watson will even offer players data comparing their weekly scoring averages to other teams in their league before and after potential trades. There will be “fair trade” insights provided by IBM’s AI and “boom” or “bust” percentages for a team before and after a trade. “Trade Assistant with IBM Watson uses IBM Watson Discovery’s natural language processing capabilities to suggest trades and provide player insights by extracting, translating and reviewing data points like: player stats, media coverage (news articles, blogs, podcast transcripts) and experts’ sentiment,” IBM explained in a statement. Chris Jason, senior director of product management within the fantasy sports division of ESPN’s parent company Disney, said IBM’s technologies help to make ESPN Fantasy Football more interactive for fans and differentiated from other products.
