The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are fast approaching and in the United States, one of the ways to stream all sporting events – whether prime time or not – will be on NBC’s Peacock. To deliver a more personalized experience for all subscribers, Peacock is pairing popular broadcaster Al Michaels with the power of AI (as in Aartificial Iintelligence).
Each day of the Games, you’ll receive a personalized highlight recap as part of a new feature called ‘Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock’ showing highlights from the three sports you select. Part of this summary will be narrated and enhanced by Michaels – well, by the AI’s generative version of him.
And fear not — NBC got permission to use his voice from Michaels, who said, “I was skeptical but obviously curious” when approached, but “I saw a demo detailing what they had in mind” and participated. ChatGPT made do with Her.
Essentially, once you go through an onboarding process, Peacock’s backend technology works to create a text script using the subtitles and metadata from the sports clips. It then puts it all into Michaels’ style and reads it back.
The text script then runs through a speech AI, which has a foundational model built from Michaels’ past appearances on NBC — interestingly, he didn’t record anything custom for this — and a multi-step process that refines the speech to get the right pronunciations, annotations, and even breathing style or overall speed.
Finally, and this is an important step, there is an actual human checking that it looks natural and that there are no glaring inaccuracies. The videos will have a disclaimer of sorts, displaying “Generated with AI” in the upper left corner each day.
The result is that you’ll get a push notification in the Peacock app on iOS or on the web, telling you that the recap is ready and inviting you to join in. It’ll start with a roughly 30-second intro, followed by clips from the sport, then another narration from Al, more clips, another paired with clips, and then a byline highlighting the day’s main events. You can also skip to return to the narrated portion or cycle through the different clips.
It feels real
When you first sign up, which is free for all Peacock subscribers, you write your name, choose your three favorite sports, and then the types of highlights you’re most interested in. It’s pretty simple, and I can confirm from a demo that it looked like Michaels. The clips were natural, with words you would expect to hear, and they had a good pace overall.
The first daily recap will be the same for all users on July 27, 2024, as it will show moments from the Opening Ceremonies, but if you sign up, you will see personalized recaps designed for your specific requests starting July 28, 2024.
Peacock said his various team members, including engineers and data scientists, integrate, optimize and validate the LLM (large-language-model) and text-to-speech technology, essentially taking Michaels’ voice and creating A model. It will be very interesting to see how it works on a daily basis and the responses from all kinds of users.
This seems like a unique way to provide easy access to your favorite moments from the games, whether you’re a big fan of the most popular sport that will be on prime time or a sport that’s generally harder to track down. Potentially, and more importantly, it’s a way to get more people excited about gaming.
As the Paris 2024 Olympic Games approach, you’ll start to see the option to sign up for “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock.” The experience will be available through the iOS app and on the web.
