  The application of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in soccer
offers numerous opportunities for sports analytics. Specifically, extracting
audio commentaries with ASR provides valuable insights into the events of the
game, and opens the door to several downstream applications such as automatic
highlight generation. This paper presents SoccerNet-Echoes, an augmentation of
the SoccerNet dataset with automatically generated transcriptions of audio
commentaries from soccer game broadcasts, enhancing video content with rich
layers of textual information derived from the game audio using ASR. These
textual commentaries, generated using the Whisper model and translated with
Google Translate, extend the usefulness of the SoccerNet dataset in diverse
applications such as enhanced action spotting, automatic caption generation,
and game summarization. By incorporating textual data alongside visual and
auditory content, SoccerNet-Echoes aims to serve as a comprehensive resource
for the development of algorithms specialized in capturing the dynamics of
soccer games. We detail the methods involved in the curation of this dataset
and the integration of ASR. We also highlight the implications of a multimodal
approach in sports analytics, and how the enriched dataset can support diverse
applications, thus broadening the scope of research and development in the
field of sports analytics.
