# Round Review — Press Fact Sheet

*Last updated: July 2026. Round Review is in private beta; details below reflect that pre-launch stage and will be updated here.*

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## In one line

Round Review is a voice-first golf tracker: after a shot, you say what happened —
"driver, nice and easy, found the fairway" — and AI turns it into your shot map,
dispersion, and strokes gained. No club sensors, no tapping through menus.

## Short description (≈50 words)

Round Review is a golf tracker you talk to. Say what happened after a shot and AI
builds the data: shot map, dispersion, strokes gained, even the target you had in
mind. Capture per shot from your Apple Watch, between holes, or by scanning your
scorecard and talking through the round on the drive home. No sensors to buy.

## Long description (≈90 words)

Most golf trackers make you choose between a bag of sensors and a screen you tap
all round. Round Review captures your game from your voice instead. Speak a
sentence after a shot and AI structures it into a logged shot — club, distance,
lie, result, and the target you were aiming at — then builds your shot maps,
dispersion, strokes gained, and the tendencies hiding in your own words. It works
however the round allows: per shot from the Apple Watch, between holes on the
walk, or after the round from a photo of your scorecard and a talk-through on the
drive home. Nothing to strap to your clubs, nothing extra to charge.

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## Fast facts

| | |
|---|---|
| **Name** | Round Review |
| **Category** | Sports / Golf |
| **Platforms** | iPhone + Apple Watch (iOS); CarPlay drive-home review |
| **Availability** | In private beta; public App Store launch to follow |
| **Pricing** | First 3 rounds free, then a monthly subscription. Pricing announced at launch. |
| **Developer** | Sam Bauch (independent) |
| **Website** | https://roundreview.golf |
| **Press contact** | press@roundreview.golf |

## Key features

- **Voice capture** — say what happened after a shot; AI turns your words into structured shot data.
- **Tech you want, when you want it** — capture per shot from the watch, between holes, or entirely after the round. As much or as little as the moment calls for.
- **No sensors** — runs on the phone in your pocket and the Apple Watch on your wrist. Nothing screwed into your clubs.
- **Shot maps** — every shot placed on the real hole from your voice; drag any shot to the yard if you want it exact.
- **Dispersion, compare-first** — your real spread by club, splittable by your own words ("the ones I got quick on").
- **Strokes gained** — off the tee, approach, short game, and putting — computed without a single sensor.
- **Noticings** — the app surfaces patterns across rounds and hands them back as plain sentences, in your language.
- **Scorecard scan** — photograph a paper card and AI reads the whole thing in seconds: scores, fairways, greens, putts, even the hand-drawn arrow for a miss right. It maps that shorthand to real shot outcomes, turning a scanned card into a reconstructed round.
- **Apple Watch + CarPlay** — speak shots from the wrist; review the round by voice on the drive home.

## What makes it different

Sensor systems (like Arccos) auto-detect shots but cost $200–$600 in hardware and
can only know *where* the ball went. Chatbot "AI caddie" apps point voice the other
way — talking advice at you. Round Review is the only tracker built around voice as
*input*: your words become your data, and it captures the context a sensor can't —
the club you were torn on, the target you aimed at, and how the swing felt.

## Technology (for the technically curious — free to quote)

Round Review is a chain of AI systems, not a chatbot with a golf skin. The shape of
the stack (not the secret sauce):

- **Language → structured signals.** An LLM turns a natural sentence ("driver, nice
  and easy, hung it out right, greenside bunker") into typed shot data — club, lie,
  shape, result, intended target, felt tempo — deliberately preserving the player's
  own phrasing rather than normalizing it to textbook terms.
- **ShotPlacer.** A spatial model places each shot from its description: every clue
  becomes a probability field over the hole's real geometry (fairway, green, hazards,
  elevation), and the shot lands where the clues agree — a maximum-a-posteriori
  estimate, not a guess. One implementation runs on phone, watch, and server, whether
  a shot was spoken, tapped, or read off a scorecard.
- **"In your words."** Near-verbatim phrases are embedded as vectors and matched by
  meaning, so "got quick," "rushed it," and "came out of it" resolve to one felt
  pattern — then stats are conditioned on those feels (strokes gained when you felt
  smooth vs. quick), which a club sensor structurally can't do.
- **Noticings.** An agentic pipeline where deterministic statistics find the real
  patterns (numbers from math), an LLM narrates them in plain language (words from
  model), and a lifecycle layer gates on an evidence floor and tracks whether a
  pattern is forming, holding, or has gone quiet.
- **On-device.** Increasingly runs on Apple's on-device foundation models, for
  privacy and speed.

The moat isn't any single model — it's the pipeline that turns unstructured speech
into structured, spatial, personalized golf data.

## About the founder

Round Review is built by **Sam Bauch**, an independent developer who's spent 20+
years writing software and playing golf. He built it to close a gap he kept hitting
himself: the rich shorthand on a paper scorecard that gets thrown away, and phone
apps that pull you out of the round. Available for interviews and questions at
press@roundreview.golf.

## Quotes (from founder Sam Bauch — free to use)

> "I've always written fairways, greens in regulation, and putts on my scorecard —
> then thrown the card away and done nothing with the data. I tried the usual GPS
> apps, but I hate being on my phone on the course. Round Review closes that gap:
> shot-level data, without being buried in my phone between shots."

> "Bryson DeChambeau asking Gemini to fix his swing is silly. Me asking Claude to
> fix my swing is even sillier. But using AI to track my game — my swing feels, my
> targets and intents, my outcomes — shows me where I'm leaking strokes, helps me
> manage the course better, and gives me evidence to bring to a coach for the
> mechanical stuff."

> "I've been building software and playing golf for 20+ years, and I'm not very good
> at either. So I'm using AI to help me build Round Review — and Round Review is going
> to use AI to help my golf. Check back in a year to see if it works."

## Media assets

A full press kit — app screenshots, transparent device mockups, 16:9 blog-ready
images, and logos (branded and minimal) — is available at
https://roundreview.golf/press and as a single download at
https://roundreview.golf/press/press-kit.zip

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*Pricing and launch timing on this page are pre-launch and may change. Email
press@roundreview.golf to confirm before publishing.*
