SwingVision: Tennis Pickleball

One thing this app does really well is remove the space between points. However, the biggest problem is as soon as someone signs up and give you a 30 day trial and then put you into a $129 annual fee. The AI is supposed to label each shot as top spin backspin or flat and it fails miserably at doing this with Pickleball. It just calls everything a flat shot. Unfortunately, even though my playing partners and me were wearing different color, shirts and pants and hats, out of 28/3 shot drops attributed to me eight of them were actually my partner. Every third shot was called a drive regardless of whether it was a drop or drive. Additionally all of them are called flat even though virtually every third shot is hit with top spin regardless of whether it’s a drive or a drop. There’s a lot of potential here, but I’m not an investor in this project. If this was a great product, maybe their model works, but I think even for people that have the money to spend the force subscription chases them away. It seems rather shortsighted to me. Limits video to HD even if your phone can do 4k. I think the lower quality video may be partly to blame for the bad ai processing. Doesn’t keep score accurately. Maybe it gets better and maybe the 4k version is better. I used for pickleball and I sense that this may actually just be a tennis app that is trying to make money off pickleball but not doing it honestly. Seriously it doesn’t know spin and can’t tell a drop from a drive.

I’m amazed at how much of the time the AI scoring is captured correctly. When it’s not however, I struggle to find the button for switching point winner when, for instance, the AI detects a second serve as well out but then awards the point to the server. Oddly, in this case after the 2nd serve was detected out, the point was awarded to the server, and the last shot was listed as ‘forehand winner’, which I assume was the returner hitting the long serve back to the server. When I entered the ‘edit point’ interface there was no button to switch the point winner, and all I could do was select a different reason for the server to win the point which they’d actually lost. Similarly, if it detects the wrong winner when that player had 40, I guess it views the rest of the points under that same server as a casual rally, and skips over them in the point by point. Even then, if I switch it to shot by shot, I still cannot scrub to those extra ‘rally’ exchanges to change them into actual points. The video just jumps to the next or previous exchanges that it interpreted as actual points. I did see an item in the 11.6 version patch notes that mentioned the switch point winner button no longer shows on unsupported sessions. Perhaps this is why the button is gone for editing? I just don’t know what an unsupported session means. Anyway, this is super cool, and the monthly option is obviously a great thing to have while the app is growing. If someone stops using it because a feature is still being improved, they properly do not have to invest their money during that period, which is terrific.

This App has the potential to be amazing! The problem is they are building too broad and forgetting the basics. Fundamental to tennis recording is the score. The advertised “AI scoring” is never correct. At best it gets the winner of all games right, but messes up multiple points. On average it gets 1 or 2 games wrong and 10+ points wrong. This is over about 20+ sets I have recorded through SwingVision. All the added functionality is useless without having the correct score. I have requested multiple times that SwingVision build the feature to allow a user to correct the auto scoring post-match. I know they have a “live” feature with Apple Watch, but they also need a post match feature. This will ensure the final video has the correct score because it is audited by the user. Additionally, this will provide extremely valuable training data for the AI auto scorer to learn from its mistakes and become more accurate. Please Swing Vision create this feature and then I will happily change my review to 5 stars as once the scoring is correct, the app truly is great!!