NEW YORK – Al Michaels, meet A.I. Michaels.
During its One Month Out press event in New York City on Wednesday, NBCUniversal unveiled a new artificial intelligence-powered feature for its upcoming Olympics coverage called “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock.” The feature will offer Peacock subscribers personalized video playlists of Olympics coverage from the day prior narrated by a generative AI recreation of legendary broadcaster Al Michaels’ voice.
“The challenge, as we see it – or frankly, the opportunity – is how can you make the viewing experience simple? And thanks to all this new technology that’s come along every year, how do you make it more personalized?” said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, who added the idea arose during a meeting about NBC’s Peacock-exclusive NFL Wild Card Game stream last year.
“We were talking about: ‘What could we do with AI? How do we leverage AI purely for fun, and for good, and supercharge live sports with something new?’ The team came back with a few ideas – and we immediately knew that one of those ideas was perfect for the Olympics.”
“Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” will first be available on July 27, when it will highlight the Opening Ceremony on July 26. Starting July 28, further editions will automatically curate highlight reels based on user-submitted preferences, both in terms of sport and content genre (e.g., behind-the-scenes, top competition, trending moments, etc.), with the AI-recreated and synthesized version of Michaels’ voice offering overviews of the action.
The narration scripts are generated by pulling from NBC Sports clips, and Michaels’ delivery was trained using his past appearances on NBC. NBCU also said the clips and audio used will be reviewed by a team of editors for quality assurance and accuracy before they go live.
“Each one of those [video] clips has information about athletes and other things, a sense of how important they are as well. And then we combine that with the subtitles of the clips themselves,” said NBCUniversal SVP/Product and UX, Peacock and Global Streaming John Jelley. “Then we take it to what we call a refining layer. We’re taking the first version, it’s basically the highlights. It then gets rewritten in Al Michaels’ style based on some examples of the script that we optimally want it to sound like. Then it gets checked for words that may sound a bit odd, or cliches.
“It’s prompt engineering, essentially. Chaining one prompt after another to refine the output. When you go into [a large language model] today and you type in [a prompt], you’re normally just asking one thing. What we’re doing here is asking one thing, we’re getting the output, and then we’re refining it again, refining it again.”
The last phase before editorial review, Jelley added, is honing Michaels’ delivery – think, his breathing or pace of speaking – and integrating Olympics-specific verbiage like athlete names or competition locations.
Asked if NBCU leveraged AI vendors in the development process, Jelley said: “What we can say is [the models] are absolutely state of the art, and we’ve made sure that the tools we’re using deliver the output you heard.” He also noted the system has been rigorously tested using footage from past Olympics.
The feature will be accessible via web browser and the Peacock app, with playlists customizable by individual profile. The daily recaps will run around 10 minutes each.
NBCU projects that nearly seven million variants of “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” could stream during the Games based on 5,000 hours of live coverage from Paris.
Michaels said in a statement announcing the news that he was “skeptical but obviously curious,” when approached about the project. “Then I saw a demonstration of what they had in mind. I said, ‘I’m in.'" Jelley was a part of the group that pitched the concept to Michaels.
“I have to give a lot of credit to Al,” Jelley said. “When we spoke to him about it, he said that he had been following the growth of AI in the news, that he had seen what’s happening with Nvidia and OpenAI and everything else, and he wanted to be part of that future. He’s really embracing it in a way that’s kind of amazing.”
0 of 3
