An AI version of Al Michaels will deliver Olympic recaps on Peacock

[Karlston]

NBC’s AI-generated voice could create nearly 7 million customized recaps during the Paris Olympics.

 

Legendary sportscaster Al Michaels is going to give daily, personalized recaps of the Paris Olympics on Peacock — well, an AI-generated Al Michaels voice will. In practice, the effect is a lot like hearing a sports announcer’s voice in a video game like Madden, except it’s spitting out lines about real-life sports, which, in this case, means custom Olympics coverage.

 

Here’s how it works. To set up what NBC is calling “Your Daily Olympic Recap” in the Peacock app, you’ll provide your name (the AI voice can welcome the “majority” of people by their first name, NBC says in a press release) and pick up to three types of sports that are interesting to you and up to two types of highlights (for example, “Top Competition” or “Viral & Trending Moments”). Then, each morning, you’ll get your Michaels-led rundown.

 

Here’s an example of Peacock’s Olympics recap led by the AI-generated Al Michaels voice.

 

To help protect against potential AI-made weirdness, NBC says that “a team of NBCU editors will review all content, including audio and clips, for quality assurance and accuracy before recaps are made available to users.” But I still feel like there’s the chance somebody’s recap will include an AI-generated hallucination spoken out loud in Al Michaels’ voice, like highlighting the wrong athlete or bungling some unusual outcome in a sport.

 

The voice was trained using Michaels’ appearances on NBC, according to the press release, and the experience was built in-house, NBCUniversal’s John Jelley tells The Verge in a statement. “Our in-house Peacock team of engineers, product managers and data scientists developed a proprietary process to integrate, optimize and validate state-of-the-art large language model and voice synthesis technology to create this experience.”

 

Image: NBC

 

In the press demo where I heard the voice, it sounded convincing, but that’s what you’d expect from a demo. The real test will be when it’s generating millions of unique clips — NBC estimates there could be nearly 7 million personalized variants in the US during the games — crossing dozens of sports, each with its own unique terminology, and identifying an array of athletes from around the globe.

 

Peacock’s recaps led by the AI Al Michaels will be available starting July 27th in supported browsers and the iOS [and iPadOS] and Android Peacock apps. The first edition of the recap will feature highlights from the opening ceremony for everyone, and the personalized recaps will start on July 28th.

 

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

 

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