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

Legendary sportscaster Al Michaels is going to deliver daily, personalized recaps of the Paris Olympics on Peacock — well, an AI-generated Al Michaels voice will do that. In practice, the effect is similar to listening to a sports announcer’s voice in a video game To angerExcept it has lines about real-life sports tossed in, which in this case means custom Olympics coverage.

Here’s how it works. To set up what NBC calls “Your Daily Olympics Recap” in the Peacock app, you need to provide your name (the AI ​​voice can greet “most” people by their first name, NBC said in a press release) and choose three types of sports you find interesting and two types of highlights (for example, “top competitions” or “viral and trending moments”). Then, every morning, you’ll get your rundown, led by Michaels.

To help protect against potential AI-created weirdness, NBC says that “a team of NBCU editors will review all content, including audio and clips, for quality assurance and accuracy before the recap is made available to users.” But I still think it’s likely someone will be involved in the recap AI-generated hallucinations Spoken loudly in Al Michaels’ voice, such as highlighting a wronged athlete or highlighting some unusual result in a game.

According to the press release, the voice was trained using Michaels’ appearances on NBC, and the experience was created in-house, explained NBCUniversal’s John Jelley. Verge in a statement. “Our in-house Peacock team of engineers, product managers, and data scientists developed a proprietary process for integration, optimization, and validation “State-of-the-art large language models and voice synthesis technology have been used to create this experience.”

In the press demo where I heard the voice, it sounded convincing, but that’s what you expect from a demo. The real test will be when it produces millions of unique clips — NBC estimates there could be as many as 7 million individual versions in the U.S. during the Games — traversing dozens of sports, each of which has its own unique vocabulary, and identifying an array of athletes from around the world.

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

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media. Vergeis the parent company of.