Swupnil Sahai, CEO of SwingVision is back for SwingVision – Magic Tennis Technology (Part Two) talking with us about the magic tennis technology!

SwingVision is the A.I. tennis app that brings you pro-quality shot tracking, video analysis, and line calling on any court, using just your iPhone!

Grand Slam Experience to Any Court in the World

SwingVision is not your regular tennis app. It brings the grand slam experience to your court with improved AI accuracy for line-calling and offers a unique way to review matches, distilling hours of gameplay into a 15-minute video.

Record Your Tennis Game with SwingVision

All you need to do is set up your iPhone behind the baseline and SwingVision will automatically track the stats of all the players on the court, generate highlights of the best rallies and shots, and you can even use it to call the lines now.

This is truly MAGIC TENNIS TECHNOLOGY and it will blow your mind!

Here’s a transcript of our discussion:

Carolyn: 0:06
Hi, this is Carolyn and I’m here with Eriin, and this is part two of our episode with Swupnil, who is the CEO of SwingVision, which is an AI tennis app. If you’d like to learn more about SwingVision and the features that can help with line calling, please check out part one, but here is part two.

Erin: 0:21
The thing that I’ve used it for lately that I really like is using it with the ball machine, which I didn’t for a long time I just thought matches and the line calling. But I did it the other day and then I sent the video to a pro. Just even doing SwingVision a couple sessions for me helped me fix my ground stroke because I noticed just some weird things that I was doing. I didn’t notice it when I was hitting, but when I filmed myself and watched it back. But the cool thing for that was I sent them the second video and I said watch my Swing, pick apart whatever you want, but what you really need to look at is my terrible serve. So I said, fast forward through like 17 minutes. You could watch like two minutes of my ground stroke and then fast forward and then watch my. So that’s been super helpful. And I know I listened to you on another podcast, carolyn and I both did. I know you talked a lot about that part of the app now where people can be anywhere in the world really and do some coaching. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Swupnil: 1:22
Yeah, definitely. We’re seeing a lot of juniors use it, but just anybody who has a coach. You can film your match, you can send it to your coach and you can send very specific things too, so you don’t even have to send the entire video. You could filter and say, just show me the forehands that I missed, and you can send a link of just those highlights to your coach. They can immediately open it in the browser. So we’ve built a lot of infrastructure on our website so that anybody can just watch it, even if you don’t have the app, even if you’re on Android, which we don’t support yet. So that’s really facilitated a lot more remote coaching now and we’re seeing way more coaching happening on the road, which is excellent. And going into next year, yeah, the plan there is to really kind of put that all keep it all in the app so it’s as seamless and streamlined as possible, because right now I think if you send it to the coach, they’d probably have to send you feedback outside the app, whether they’re texting it to you or sending an email or putting it in Google Docs or whatever it is. So if you can just have that feedback directly in the app, that just makes it so easy. And imagine, like you have like a two hour match but you send it to a coach and then next morning you open up the app and just watch a two minute highlight reel of what your coach annotated and like in two minutes you know what you need to work on, what you need to focus on for the next match or whatever it is. So it’s just going to make kind of ingesting and understanding that feedback a lot faster and it’s going to be so excellent for coaches because they’ll go to have like so much more business. So that’s a really exciting thing that we have planned for next year. But we’ve just done a lot of work, I’d say, over the last 12-18 months, to just make that sharing experience as good as we can. And you know, part of that is kind of making it easy to watch it on the website. Part of it’s also like making sure that video uploads properly, which has always been a big challenge for us. You know we’re one of the few apps in the world that is like regularly uploading 10 gigabyte files, like literally no one else does that. So you know, even if you’re using like Google Photos, you’re probably not taking two hour long videos every day, but our customers are literally recording matches every day, so we’ve had to innovate a lot on that side. So it’s a lot of the like non-sexy stuff, I guess, that we’ve had to work on, but it really is so critical to making a good experience for everybody, whether you’re a player or coach. So we’re really proud of the innovations we’ve made there, and even just the last couple months, we’ve made some really significant updates there, and the video upload process is like so much better now, so much more reliable, so that ultimately unlocks like all this sharing functionality. And again, speaking of sharing, another cool one is you’ve seen this on our Instagram, but now the video like automatically moves left and right, as if there’s like a cameraman watching your match, which is like super cool, and so you can record your match in like landscape, but then you can create this cool highlight reel where it will follow the ball automatically, and so it’s essentially like an AI generated highlight reel and it looks really nice on Instagram or TikToks any of those vertical platforms and so that’s been super fun and we’re going to do more there to make those like highlight reels even more captivating and interesting, and you could imagine someday like we might even start like streaming matches in that format because, like everyone’s so used to like watching content in a vertical form now, like they’re just used to holding their phone as it is right and not rotating it, and so you can kind of give that choice to a user that like, hey, if you don’t want to actually watch a landscape, you could just watch it in vertical and, like in real time, Swing Engine will just follow the ball so you can like stay on the action. So I think there’s lots of like cool things we can do in the future there to make that even better. But I think we’ve really innovated a lot there and the content that’s coming out of Swing E just works so well, no matter what platform you’re trying to post it on, whether it’s YouTube or Instagram or sharing with your friends on iMessage, right. So there’s been a lot of work there as well, which I think people really enjoyed.

Erin: 4:49
What other features do we want to talk about? I know there’s so many.

Swupnil: 4:52
Another thing that we released recently was goal mode. So this is actually great for if you have a ball machine. So if you’re setting up your session as ball machine or sort of practice, in the app you can actually turn on goal mode, which lets you select certain zones of the core that you’re trying to aim for, and you can actually change these zones, like from your watch as well, while you’re playing and while you’re recording, and what will happen is your phone or if you’re wearing like headphones, you’ll actually get audio feedback. So every time the ball lands in or out you’ll actually hear a different sound effect. So it kind of gamifies it. And then it even tells you the speed of your shot. It gives you like a progress. So every few shots I’ll say, like you know, 25 out of 30 shots and stuff like that. So it gives you like a sense of like your progress and like your percentage. And I love using that with ball machine. So you know, I’m always working like on the depth of my shots, so all kind of select zones that are like beyond the service box, and then they’ll actually tell me like how many of my shots landed in that specific part of the court, and so kind of gamifies it. So that’s been really cool, and we just introduced that a couple months ago and we’re going to continue involving that functionality so that eventually you’ll even get feedback on your technique and the app will even tell you, like what adjustments you need to make, like why did you miss that last shot? You know what was wrong? Well, I should go to tell you that. So that’s kind of a long-term goal with that functionality, and it’s great because it’s used in those situations where you’re just playing alone, like you’re just doing serves, you’re hitting the ball machine classically, kind of like a boring thing to do, you’re just out there on the court, you know, alone, but this kind of gamifies it and allows you to measure your progress in real time actually, and interact with the technology in real time, which is like kind of fun. So, yeah, that’s been like a pretty recent, recent feature. And then, I guess, more on like the performance side, something that we have coming up also in Q4 is that we’re going to start recommending strategies for players. So if you play a match with somebody, after the match you’ll get a little readout of like what strategies work the best and which ones were actually the worst strategies, and these will be pretty granular. So it’ll say, like, when you’re serving from the do side, this is where you should hit the serve and this is where you should hit the like serve plus one shot, and if you do this, you’ll win the point like 90% of the time, or whatever it is. So we’ll actually give you like very clear, like playbooks, essentially on how to play certain players, which I think is going to be amazing for actually helping you improve your game, because that’s always been like one critique. This thing we did is that, like we try to call these statutes is cool, but like, what do I do with it? It’s just like too much to do sometimes so our team worked really hard this summer to come up with this new interface where it’s going to explain in a very easy to understand way You’re going to know what plays you need to execute on, and it plays that aren’t working that well. Those will also be very helpful because this could maybe be plays that you work on with your coach. Like you’re losing a lot of points when your opponent does this particular pattern of shots against you, and so now you can just go and like with a coach or with a ball machine, just replicate that exact pattern and like make sure you’re not making mistakes when those come up on the match. So that’s going to be super powerful, I think, a very next level thing that we’re going to do there, and hopefully will, you know, really be helpful for all players. So super exciting, though, too.

Erin: 7:51
I lose points when my opponent gets the ball back on my side of the court.

Carolyn: 7:58
I hear you Erin.

Erin: 8:01
Right. But the other thing that I like is looking at the stats after like how many forehands I had hit, how many backhands cross courts. Like it records so much data I can’t like gush more about it. But also we laugh because I know you just went to the US Open. I just went to the US Open. I’ve been to other like more local, smaller tournaments around and we were just at one a couple weeks ago here in North Carolina and there was a guy who was hitting like 120, 130 on his serve and I’m sure you saw Ben Shelton hit like a 139 or 147 or something and then you know, I look at my swing vision stats, it’s like 34. Yeah, or I was telling my friends. I said, oh, I hit the same as Ben’s, just minus the first number. He hit a 137. I hit a 37. But the fact that you can see all those stats is really, it’s just really cool.

Carolyn: 8:53
Thanks again to Swupnil for coming on the podcast. We have one more episode with Swupnil where he’ll discuss the cool things they are doing with the score and if maybe one day, as recreational players, won’t have to keep up with the score. If you’d like to get a free swing stick, which is $100 value, with your first year of Swing Vision Pro, we hope you use our referral link in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening and hope to see you on the court soon.

Tennis Warehouse’s Tip of the Week

We hope you’ve heard some of our Tennis Warehouse’s Tip of the Week segments with Michelle. Use discount code SECONDSERVE in your Tennis Warehouse cart and get $20 off clearance apparel orders over $100. Clearance apparel can be found here!

For more in-depth discussions about gear, check out Michelle’s Talk Tennis podcast.

We hosted Michelle for several great podcast episodes too. You can find them here:

Ep. 118: Gear Talk with Tennis Warehouse’s Playtester, Michelle (Ep. 1)
Ep. 119: Gear Talk with Tennis Warehouse (Ep. 2)
Ep. 120: Gear Talk with Tennis Warehouse (Ep. 3)