ESPN is testing a generative AI avatar called ‘FACTS’

ESPN is testing an AI-generated avatar with the Saturday college football show SEC Nation. Dubbed FACTS, it’s going to be “…promoting education and fun around sports analytics” with information drawn from ESPN Analytics, which includes data like the Football Power Index (FPI), player and team statistics, and game schedules. We haven’t seen the avatar in action, but it sounds like a bot-ified version of stats encyclopedia Howie Schwab, who was ESPN’s first statistician and eventually the star of a mid-2000s game show, Stump the Schwab.

ESPN has already brought generative AI to its website with AI-written game recaps. FACTS is still in development, and there’s no word on when it could make its first appearance on the network.

FACTS uses Nvidia’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine), an Azure OpenAI integration to power language processing, and ElevenLabs for its text-to-speech capabilities.

In the announcement from its ESPN Edge Innovation Conference, the network claims FACTS is “absolutely not” made to replace journalists or other talent. “FACTS is designed to test innovations out in the market and create an outlet for ESPN Analytics’ data to be accessible to fans in an engaging and enjoyable segment,” the company writes.