We are only 30 days away from the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics on July 26, which will be held in and around Paris, France. Today, NBCUniversal announced its plans to cover the event in the US on both its NBC TV network and its Peacock streaming service.
The most interesting and potentially controversial part of the coverage will likely be Peacock"s use of an AI-generated voice that"s based on a real sportscaster. In an email press release, the streaming service announced its plans for "Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock."
Starting July 27, subscribers of Peacock can go to its Olympic hub and register what kinds of highlights from the Paris games they want to see every day. That will include things like their three favorite sports, along with other features such as backstories of athletes, trending moments and more. The first such highlight video will be of that opening ceremony, with the customized highlights video gathered from each day"s Olympic matches starting on July 28.
The press release adds:
The technology will pull from hundreds of NBC Sports-produced clips each day to generate a playlist of around 10 minutes highlighting the most relevant moments from the prior day for each user, along with a look ahead to what fans can expect to see in the NBC Primetime show. The recaps narrated by the A.I. re-creation of Michaels’ voice will give an overview of each selected highlight. 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.
Peacock says that it expects almost 7 million personalized Olympic highlight videos, with the AI version of Michaels narrating them, to be generated during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The AI voice version of Michaels was trained by using clips of his past appearances on NBC. The press release quotes the real Michaels (at least that is what it claims) as saying:
“When I was approached about this, I was skeptical but obviously curious,” said Al Michaels. “Then I saw a demonstration detailing what they had in mind. I said, ‘I’m in.""
It will be interesting to see how well this technology works and if this use should worry the rest of the sports journalists, who may fear they could lose their jobs in a few years with AI synthetic voices.