NBC plans to use an artificial clone of sportscaster Al Michaels' voice to narrate its daily streaming recaps of the Paris Summer Olympics, the company announced Wednesday.
“Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” will feature narration by a “high-quality AI recreation” of Michaels' voice, trained using his past NBC appearances to match his “expertise and elocution signature,” the streaming service announced. . (Peacock and NBC News are owned by NBCUniversal, a unit of Comcast.)
Michaels, 79, told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that he was initially “very skeptical” of NBCUniversal executives' proposal, until he heard the AI-generated version of his speaking voice, which is capable of greet viewers by name.
“Frankly, it was amazing. It was unbelievable,” he told the magazine in a phone interview last weekend. “And it was kind of scary.”
Replay every moment and every medal from the Paris 2024 Olympics on Peacock, starting with the opening ceremony on July 26 at 12 pm ET.
Michaels said he was amazed at how the cloned voice reflected his style: “It wasn't just close,” he said, “it was almost 2% off perfect.”
He joined NBC Sports in 2006 and announced the network's broadcast of “Sunday Night Football” through 2021. He was named to a role emeritus at the network the following year. Michael uttered perhaps the most famous six words in sports broadcasting history at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid after the US hockey team triumphed over the Soviet Union in a stunning upset: “You believe in miracles? Yes!”
The announcement comes as artificial intelligence technologies attract wider public attention and scrutiny, inspiring equal parts surprise and anxiety. According to Peacock, the cloned version of Michaels' voice will feature generative AI and AI speech synthesis technology.
“Your Daily Olympic Roundup on Peacock” will offer streaming subscribers a personalized playlist of competition highlights. Peacock estimates that nearly 7 million customized variants of the summary could be broadcast in the United States during the Games, based on NBC's 5,000 hours of live coverage.
Español de Venezuela 
English 