Can Al Michaels Produce an Olympics AI Miracle?
Olympics viewers can personalize recaps using an AI-generated replica of Al Michaels' voice on Peacock
The Olympics begin this weekend. Fans watching on NBC’s streaming service Peacock will be treated to a new AI implementation, Your Daily Olympic Recap featuring “Al Michaels”. Using a subscriber’s series of personal sports preferences, AI will pull from thousands of hours of video coverage to create a 10-minute daily highlight reel, narrated by a generated cone of Al Michaels’s voice.
Rich with Olympics and sports nostalgia, this AI implementation could be the ideal use case. NBC expects the AI Olympics Recap to generate more than 7 million unique highlight videos for its Peacock subscribers.
If well received, the Al Michaels bot will demonstrate the power of AI to a significant subset of the American population. It would highlight both the power of an LLM to summarize vast amounts of media and content AND generative AI’s ability to use voice cloning meaningfully and ethically. The Al Michaels bot could also go a long way to relieving fears about AI.
Customization
Perhaps most important, it’s an AI built to meet a specific desire for Olympics fans. It allows users to select the sports they care about via the media form that’s most important to them. Factors Peacock users can choose from include:
Three favorite sports
Preferred topics, such as behind-the-scenes and backstories
Top competition
Viral and trending moments
Spotlights on international teams.
The effort also illustrates how using an AI such as a voice or video generator can help personalities and talent execute tasks they never could individually. For example, Al Michaels providing personalized individual recaps to millions of viewers would not be possible without AI.
What about the potential for fake Al hallucinations and gaffes? NBC editors will review all clips before releasing them. Still even with a human in the. loop, will we experience a fake Al gaffe? Will it matter?
Interested parties can access Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock this July 27, and every day afterward through the Olympics. Kudos to Al Michaels for supporting the initiative.