NBC announced that an AI version of sportscaster Al Michaels will deliver personalized recaps to Peacock users ahead of the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
All it takes to customize your daily 10-minute update, delivered in Michaels’ voice, is a few details: Peacock requires users to submit their name and select up to three types of sports they want to learn more about.
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The voice was trained based on Michaels’ extensive work during his time at NBC, and the AI experience was built in-house by Peacock’s “team of engineers, product managers and data scientists. NBCUniversal’s John Jerry said the team developed a process to “integrate, optimize and validate.” Cutting-edge large-scale language models and speech synthesis technology.”
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The product will be available on Peacock’s website, iOS and iPad apps. Peacock promises that its editorial team “reviews all content, including audio and clips, for quality assurance and accuracy before providing summaries to users.” NBC says there could be close to 7 million clips created over the course of the Olympics.
Media outlets covered early demos of the product. According to Vulture, “Michaels’s synthezoid-voiced performance was rather underwhelming,” while Defector noted that “the resulting tech… is pretty AI-ish, to be honest. It sounds a lot like Al Michaels, but… Seem Like Al Michaels, it’s accurate, but it’s not true.”
Michaels said he was initially “very skeptical” of the proposal, but was ultimately blown away by the technology. “I was amazed, frankly. It was amazing,” he told Vanity Fair. “And a little scared. Not only was it close to perfect, it was off by almost 2 percent. I thought, wow.”
topic
artificial intelligence
