• The sports technology startup StatMuse received a strategic investment from the GoogleAssistant Investment program to help further its vision of creating a more personalised voice experience for sports fans.
• Google’s investment was for an undisclosed amount.
• “Our view was always, what if you could have a SportsCenter of the future?” Darrow said. “Whether you have 30 seconds, 30 minutes, or 3 hours, it could be hyper-personalised to the teams and leagues that you love.”
• StatMuse joins seven other companies listed in Google Assistant’s portfolio – including Aiva Health (a voice operating system meant to improve healthcare) and AskPorter (a digital assistant to help with property management tasks).

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Soon, the voices answering your sports questions on GoogleAssistant may be from the actual athletes themselves.

On Wednesday, the sports technology startup StatMuse received a strategic investment from the Google Assistant Investment program to help further its vision of creating a more personalised experience for sports fans. Google’s investment was for an undisclosed amount.

“We think StatMuse is using voice in a really interesting way, giving beloved sports stars a chance to add some magic to the Google Assistant,” a Google spokesperson told Business Insider.

To get started, users can simply say, “OK Google, talk to StatMuse.”

When we tried it, an animated picture of ESPN commentator Scott Van Pelt appeared on our Google Home Hub and asked what we would like to know.

“Which team won the most recent Super Bowl?” we asked.

An animation of three-time Super Bowl champion Jerry Rice appeared, and he told us, “The New England Patriots won against the Los Angeles Rams.”

StatMuse has recorded the voices of 25 celebrity athletes reciting a shedload of words and phrases, such as the names of every single football team. The technology pulls from this library of words and stitches together answers to questions in each athlete’s voice.

Right now, it’s limited to about 25 superstar athletes, mostly football players from the NFL. That’s why we received an answer from Jerry Rice when we asked about this year’s game and not the Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman.

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To get around the limitation, StatMuse co-founder and CEO Eli Darrow told Business Insider in a recent interview that it has partnered with popular sports personalities -like Scott Van Pelt and Jerry Rice – to be the voice of most answers. In the future, though, expanding its library of voices will be a focus for the company.

“Our view was always, what if you could have a SportsCenter of the future?” Darrow said. “Whether you have 30 seconds, 30 minutes, or 3 hours, it could be hyper-personalised to the teams and leagues that you love.”

StatMuse was also apart of Disney’s Accelerator program back in 2015, which got Darrow and his co-founder Adam Elmore thinking that their platform could include all types of celebrities and animated characters.

“What we see in sports fandom is applicable to other areas of entertainment too,” Darrow said. “The future is about scaling celebrity likeness like never before.”

StatMuse’s voice technology is available on Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft’s Cortana as well. For sports stats via text, StatMuse also has a plugin for Slack and Facebook Messenger, and it has an iOS app.

StatMuse joins seven other companies listed in Google Assistant’s portfolio – including Aiva Health (a voice operating system meant to improve healthcare) and AskPorter (a digital assistant to help with property management tasks).

Google told us the goal of its investment program is meant to “promote more of this creativity, investing in companies that help advance the possibilities of what digital assistants can do.”

For the first-time co-founders, Darrow and Elmore said their biggest challenge early on at StatMuse was convincing people of the power of the voice ecosystem.

“There were times when you wondered if you were too early,” Darrow said.

With the growth of smart speakers industry and most recently, StatMuse receiving over 100,000 questions from users during this year’s Super Bowl well, Darrow said, “I think we kind of made it to the future.”

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