The Walt Disney Company has begun beta testing AI-powered search and discovery features on ESPN and Disney+ to help users find sports information and entertainment content more intuitively through natural language and voice-based queries.

The company, in a statement earlier this week, said the experiments are aimed at helping users who know what they are looking for but cannot precisely identify it. Insights from the beta tests will be used to improve navigation, search results, recommendations and content discovery across ESPN and Disney+ over time.

On ESPN, the company is testing ESPN Search, an AI-assisted search capability with a subset of users. The feature enables fans to ask sports-related questions in natural language and receive answers, related content, statistics and recommendations sourced from ESPN’s sports knowledge ecosystem.

According to Disney, ESPN Search draws on decades of ESPN’s trusted content and data, including published articles and videos, research, sports metadata, internal knowledge repositories and structured sports data systems, to help fans access insights more quickly.

On Disney+, a limited beta involving a small group of subscribers is exploring a new content discovery experience that complements existing personalised recommendations.

The AI-powered tool allows users to describe what they want to watch through natural language, voice input or suggested prompts so that recommendations reflect their immediate viewing needs rather than only their past viewing history.

The company described the initiatives as early efforts to explore how AI can enhance the user experience across ESPN and Disney+.

It said user feedback from the beta tests would help refine the features over time, with the goal of reducing friction and making it easier for fans to discover sports information and entertainment content.