If you ever wanted to know who has scored the most points in a game coming off the bench, or how LeBron James would’ve fit on the New York Knicks, you can Ask NBA.
The league is promoting its AI-driven chatbot as a core part of its app experience heading into Tuesday’s season tipoff, as computer-generated text becomes an increasingly common part of the sports fan’s daily experience.
The NBA has also modernized its matchup pages with a “Game Pulse” feed of highlights and stats, updating in real time. At the top of those trackers will be an algorithmically created paragraph explaining how a given contest has played out so far. In each case, a basketball with a sparkle icon indicates material coming from the cloud.
“We’re very excited about how we’re reimagining the fan experience on the NBA app and across our digital ecosystem,” NBA app experience head Jay Lee told reporters during a walkthrough of the new features on Thursday. “We want to make it easier for fans to discover, engage with and ultimately watch our live game.”
For a second consecutive year, the league has also partnered with Amazon Web Services to create new stats. The combination of advanced player tracking and machine learning has led to metrics measuring the difficulty of individual dribbling moves and the identification of when teams are in zone defense, plus how offensive players fare against that approach. AI is once again called in to synthesize and explain the new numbers in pregame and postgame reports for every matchup, made available to all viewers.
The NBA has long taken inspiration from other media platforms as it builds its own offering. Instagram-like stories circles sit at the top of the app’s home page. Vertical video, TikTok-style, is presented in a For You feed a couple tabs over.
The introduction of an NBA-focused AI chatbot, which was previously available to users who went looking for the beta experience deeper in the app’s interface, comes amid uncertainty over how often people will lean on their preferred, all-purpose AI bot for tasks such as answering NBA-related questions, rather than continuing to bounce between apps and websites, each with their own embedded AI experiences. The latest developments from the AI industry have included the launch of AI agents that can also perform online tasks for their controllers.
More features are coming to Ask NBA, the league said, including personalized answers based on a fan’s existing statistical understanding.
“We have decades of basketball data and stats, and with AI, we can really make that data accessible,” NBA Senior AI technical lead Sydney Sarachek said. “We know that whether you are watching a game for the first time this season or know every stat, you have different questions.”
Also, watch for videos to be further integrated into the NBA app’s AI feed. Already, links allowing users to watch related games will be provided as part of a larger NBA initiative to connect digital content with reminders about the real-life action in progress.