Legendary sports anchor Al Michaels will be delivering his individual reports for each day of the Paris Olympics on Peacock — an AI-generated version of his voice, to be exact — which will have a similar effect, in fact, to hearing a sports announcer's voice in a video game. MaddenHowever, they do spit lines about actual sports, which in this case means custom Olympic coverage.
Here's how it works: To set up what NBC is calling “Your Daily Olympic Recap” in the Peacock app, you enter your name (the AI voice can respond with the “vast majority” of people's first names, according to an NBC press release), choose up to three sports you're interested in, and up to two highlight categories (such as “Top Competition” or “Buzz Moments”), and then you'll get a rundown by Michaels each morning.
To guard against potential AI-generated weird shows, NBC said that “a team of editors at NBCU reviews all content, including audio and clips, for quality and accuracy before providing summaries to users.” But it still feels like there's a chance someone's summaries could include AI-generated hallucinations voiced in the voice of Al Michaels, such as highlighting the wrong athlete or messing up an unusual outcome in a sport.
The voice was trained during Michaels' time on NBC, and the experience was built in-house, NBCUniversal's John Jerry said, according to a press release. The Verge “Our in-house Peacock team of engineers, product managers and data scientists have developed a proprietary process for integrating, optimizing and validating. To deliver this experience, we employ cutting-edge large-scale language models and speech synthesis technology.”
In the press demo I heard, the audio sounded convincing, but in a demo, that's to be expected. The real test will be when it starts generating millions of unique clips — NBC estimates there could be about 7 million personalized variations in the U.S. over the course of the Olympics — across dozens of sports, each with their own terminology, and identifying different athletes from around the world.
Peacock recaps, led by AI executive Al Michaels, will be available on supported browsers and in the Peacock app for iOS and iPadOS starting July 27. NBC declined to comment on whether the recaps will be available on Android.
The first report will provide everyone with highlights from the Opening Ceremony, with personalized reports starting on 28 July.
Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, also has an investment in Vox Media. The VergeParent company of.
Correction, June 26th: An earlier version of this article misstated which platforms the recaps are available on. NBC did not say whether the feature would be coming to Android.
