There are just 30 days until 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 broadcast the event in the U.S. on both its NBC television 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 based on a real sports reporter. In an email press release, the streaming service announced its plans for “your daily Olympics recap on Peacock.”
Starting July 27, Peacock subscribers can sign up on the Olympics portal to choose which highlights from the Paris Games they want to see each day, including their three favorite sports, plus additional features like athlete backstories, trending moments and more. The first highlight video of its kind will feature the opening ceremony, and starting July 28, customized highlight videos from each day’s Olympic Games will be shown.
The press release continues:
The technology will create a roughly 10-minute playlist each day from hundreds of clips produced by NBC Sports, highlighting the previous day’s most important moments for each user and offering a preview of what fans can expect on the NBC primetime show. The recaps, delivered by the AI recreation of Michaels’ voice, will provide an overview of each selected highlight. A team of NBCU editors will review all content, including audio and clips, for quality and accuracy before providing recaps to users.
Peacock expects to create nearly 7 million personalized Olympic highlight videos during the 2024 Paris Olympics, narrated by the AI version of Michaels.
Michaels’ AI voice was trained using clips from his previous NBC appearances. In the press release, the real Michaels is quoted (or so they say) as saying:
“When I was asked about it, I was skeptical, but of course curious,” said Al Michaels. “Then I saw a demonstration that explained in detail what they were planning to do. I said, ‘I’m in.'”
It will be interesting to see how well this technology works and whether this deployment should worry the rest of the sports journalists who may fear that artificial AI voices could put them out of their jobs in a few years.
