How Sports Bot is used in our high school sports coverage

August 26 , 2022 Norcross - South Gwinnett players break their cheerleader banner before their football game against Meadowcreek at Meadowcreek High School in Norcross on Friday, August 26, 2022. (Hyosub Shin / Hyosub.Shin@ajc.com)

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

August 26 , 2022 Norcross - South Gwinnett players break their cheerleader banner before their football game against Meadowcreek at Meadowcreek High School in Norcross on Friday, August 26, 2022. (Hyosub Shin / Hyosub.Shin@ajc.com)

To supplement our high school sports reporting, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution uses an artificial intelligence tool to share summaries of high school sports games across the state of Georgia. This tool creates simple reports on those games so that athletes and families can keep up with what’s happening with their local teams.

The process begins with a free mobile app called ScoreStream, which is widely used by parents and sports fans to record high school game scores. Available for iPhone, iPad and Android, ScoreStream is used across the nation to score football, basketball, baseball, volleyball and more.

Once a game concludes, our artificial intelligence tool, called Lede AI, vets the results and generates a short game summary, which the AJC publishes under the byline “Sports Bot.”

Hundreds of games are played in Georgia high schools each week, which is too many to feature on our sports page. Thus, these automated game reports are primarily discoverable via search. Enter your team’s name in Google or your favorite search engine and look for summaries of recent games. If you don’t see results for your team, it may be because no one in attendance scored the game with ScoreStream.

Parents and fans can help get their local teams covered in the AJC by using the ScoreStream app. Download it for free on iPhone, iPad and Android and score the games you attend. Our artificial intelligence tool monitors ScoreStream results across Georgia and turns those results into game reports.

Due to the speed of the artificial intelligence tool, only a few minutes pass between the game’s final whistle and the publication of that game’s report. By the time fans attending the game get home, a summary of that game likely is already published on ajc.com.

Georgia is a large state with thousands of games played in hundreds of high schools throughout the year. No single news organization could cover each game. By leveraging artificial intelligence, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hopes to provide useful information to parents and sports fans about their local teams, even if our real sports journalists weren’t at that game.