The Paris 2024 Olympics are quickly approaching, and in the United States, one of the ways to stream all sporting events, whether in prime time or not, will be online. NBC Peacock. To offer a more personalized experience to all subscribers, Peacock is combining celebrity host Al Michaels with the power of AI (as in TOartificial Yointelligence).
Each day of the games, you'll get a personalized video highlight as part of a new feature called “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” that showcases moments from three sports you selected. Some of it will be narrated and highlighted by Michaels, well, by the generative AI 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 “saw a demo detailing what they had in mind” and agreed. That's a better approach than ChatGPT made with His.
Basically, once you go through the onboarding process, Peacock's backend technology works to create a text script using the subtitles and metadata from the sports clips. Then he puts it in Michaels style and checks it out.
The text script is then put through a voice AI, which has a fundamental model built from Michaels' past appearances on NBC (interestingly, he didn't record anything custom for this) and a multi-step process that enhances the speech to obtain the proper interpretation. pronunciations, notations and even breathing style or general speed.
Lastly, and an important step, there is a real-life human being who checks that it sounds natural and that there are no obvious inaccuracies. The videos will have a disclaimer of sorts, displaying “AI Generated” in the top left corner each day.
The result is that you will receive a push notification in the Peacock app on iOS or Android, letting you know that the summary is ready and alerting you. It will begin with an introduction of approximately 30 seconds, followed by clips of the sport. , then another narration from Al, more clips, another combined with clips, and then a farewell highlighting the main events of the day. You can also skip to return to the narrated part or jump between different clips.
This sounds real
When you first sign up, which is free for all Peacock subscribers, you'll type in your name, choose your top three sports, and then the types of highlights you find most interesting. It's pretty simple and I can confirm in a demo that it sounded like Michaels. The clips sounded natural, with words one would expect to hear, and generally had a good beat.
The first daily summary will be the same for all users on July 27, 2024, as it will show moments from the opening ceremonies, but if you register, you will see personalized summaries tailored to your specific requests starting July 28, 2024. .
Peacock said the various members of his team, including engineers and data scientists, are integrating, optimizing and validating the LLM (large language model) and speech synthesis 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 types of users.
It seems like a unique way to provide easy access to your favorite gaming moments, whether you're a big fan of the most popular sport to air in prime time or one that's generally harder to track down. Potentially, and even more importantly, it's a way to get more people excited about gaming.
As we get closer to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, you'll start to see the option to sign up for 'Your daily Olympic digest on Peacock'. The experience will be available through the iOS or Android app and on the web.
