Legendary sportscaster Al Michaels will be offering personalized daily recaps of the Paris Olympics on Peacock—well, an ai-generated voice of Al Michaels will be doing it. In practice, the effect is a lot like hearing a sportscaster's voice in a video game like To get madexcept it spits out lines about real-life sports, which, in this case, means tailored coverage of the Olympics.
Is that how it works. To set up what NBC calls “Your Daily Olympic Briefing” in the Peacock app, you'll need to provide your name (the ai voice can welcome “most” people by name, NBC says in a press release.) and select up to three types of sports that are of interest to you and up to two types of highlight moments (for example, “Core Competition” or “Viral and Trending Moments”). Then, each morning, you'll receive the briefing led by Michaels.
To help guard against potential ai-generated weirdness, NBC says that “a team of NBCU editors will review all content, including audio and clips, to ensure quality and accuracy before recaps are made available to viewers.” users”. But I still feel like there's a chance that someone's summary might include an ai-generated hallucination said out loud in Al Michaels' voice, like highlighting the wrong athlete or botching some unusual result in a sport.
The voice was trained using Michaels' appearances on NBC, according to the press release, and the experience was developed in-house, says NBCUniversal's John Jelley. The edge in a sentence. “Our internal team of Peacock engineers, product managers and data scientists developed a proprietary process to integrate, optimize and validate “Large language model and cutting-edge speech synthesis technology to create this experience.”
In the press demo where I heard the vocals, it sounded convincing, but that's what you'd expect from a demo. The real test will be when you generate millions of unique clips (NBC estimates there could be nearly 7 million custom variants in the U.S. during the games), crossing dozens of sports, each with their own unique terminology, and identifying a variety of athletes from all over the world. the world.
Peacock digests led by ai Al Michaels will be available starting July 27 in supported browsers and in the Peacock apps for iOS and Android. The first edition of the recap will include highlights from the opening ceremony for everyone, and custom recaps will begin on July 28.
Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, The edgeThe parent company.
