Arccos Golf Premiers Crowd-Sourced Hole Locations, Siri Shortcuts and 
Enhanced Putting UX for Arccos Caddie Platform

Arccos – the pioneer of big data and artificial intelligence for golf – today launched a powerful set of new features for its award-winning Arccos Caddie platform, highlighted by crowd-sourced hole locations, Siri shortcuts and an enhanced UX for putting.

Designed to provide accurate daily hole locations on a global scale, the crowd-sourcing function allows any Arccos user to set hole locations before, during or after their round. Those locations are then universally updated for every Arccos user who plays the same course anytime later in the day. That data also ties into Arccos’ rangefinder GPS and “Plays Like” distance functions.

“We’re leveraging our fast-growing user base to create a network effect where any one player’s actions can benefit the community at large,” says Jack Brown, Arccos Senior V.P. of Product and Software. “Once the hole locations are set, we’re providing highly accurate distances to the pin, potentially eliminating the need for users to carry a traditional rangefinder.”

Taking advantage of the recent updates to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant, Arccos now enables users to ask Siri to recommend a club, mark a hole location or add a duff. Players will also benefit from a more detailed green view within the Arccos Caddie app to further support pin setting, distance to the pin GPS, putt tracking and more. 

Honored among the “World’s Most Innovative Companies 2018” by Fast Company, ranking #3 in the Sports category globally, Arccos boasts the golf industry’s richest data set. This includes nearly 200 million shots hit during more than 2 million rounds played by the Arccos community, and over 500 million GPS mapping data points on 40,000+ courses worldwide. Arccos has leveraged this data by partnering with Microsoft to create golf’s smartest caddie, an A.I. platform providing any golfer with their optimal strategy and outcome predictions for every shot on any hole in the world.

“The entire sports landscape is being revolutionized by advanced analytics, and golf is the most ideal sport for the application of these concepts,” said Sal Syed, Arccos CEO and Co-Founder. “Working with Microsoft, we’re plugging into a very traditional framework – the caddie/player relationship – and taking it to the next level through the power of A.I. Considering only 3% of golfers today have access to advice from a human caddie, we’re also helping democratize the caddie experience by making it available to anyone.”

Free for all Arccos Caddie users, the A.I. platform considers a wide variety of inputs, including but not limited to a user’s shot history, historical performance of other Arccos users, wind speed/direction, other weather conditions, elevation changes, hole geometry and hazard locations.

“The PGA TOUR has done a great job of using advanced analytics to help its players practice and perform their best,” said Mike Downey, Director, Principal Evangelist – Sports at Microsoft. “At other levels of the game, capturing the necessary on-course data has been a real challenge. Arccos has cracked that code and built a robust data set which they’re deploying via the Microsoft Azure cloud to the benefit of golfers worldwide.”

Winner of the Golf Digest Editor’s Choice Award for “Best Game Analyzer” three years running, the Arccos platform helps golfers of all skill levels play smarter to shoot lower scores. In 2017, Arccos users improved their handicap by an average of 3.55 strokes – 46.7x faster than the average player with a USGA handicap. That average improvement rate increased to 3.79 strokes in 2018.

In addition to Microsoft, Arccos is an official partner with Cobra Puma Golf, which earlier this year launched golf’s first smart set, Cobra Connect Powered by Arccos. As part of this ongoing collaboration, every club in the Cobra KING F8 line features an Arccos sensor embedded in the grip. This helps players improve faster by automatically tracking and receiving actionable insights for every aspect of their game.