Machines may soon take over the world, but first they're looking at sports announcing. Peacock, the streaming provider for this year's Summer Olympics, is rolling out a new tool that offers daily video summaries narrated by a computer in an eerie impersonation of Al Michaels. Called “Peacock Daily Olympics Recaps,” the tool is a personalized 10-minute supercut based on the sports and events you've opted in to for the service's Olympics coverage, acting as a highlight reel with “high-quality AI recreations of Michaels' voice.”
The product, available on Peacock's web browser, iOS and iPad apps, mines Michaels' long career as a sports anchor at NBC to synthesize intonation and combines the synthesized commentary with video from Olympic events aired the previous day. Peacock promises that a team of sports editors will review “all content, including audio and clips,” in advance to provide quality control. And across the Olympic sports categories, the AI can generate up to 7 million video combinations. “When I heard about this, I was skeptical, but of course I was interested,” Michaels says. “Then I saw a demo detailing what they had in mind, and I said, 'I'm in.'”
A demo was shown to Vulture and other outlets, which you can watch below. While the video clip is as serviceable as the summary videos you'll see elsewhere, the performance of Michaels' synthetic voice leaves a lot to be desired. Peacock's extensive language models and editing team attempt to account for pauses, breaths, and energy shifts, and to some extent, they do, especially in the introductions to the day's playlist. But as the voice deepens and begins to describe new and dramatic events, the AI model's performance settles into a flat, formulaic tone, even when describing an emotional victory or a crushing defeat. Some of the commentary sounds odd. Running together like this in a slurry of syllables.
It also falls well short of the goal of matching Michaels' “signature expertise and enunciation.” It's certainly not a copy of his brain, nor of the thrill of watching a sportscaster express genuine emotion. (And from what we've seen so far, Al's tendency to make snarky references to gambling during calls seems lacking.) It's just stringing together words and sounds, despite the complexity of the process. At least, you can opt out of this method (and concerns about unintentionally damaging the environment by using it during the “hottest Olympics in history”) entirely in your Peacock settings after the July 27 rollout.
