NBC to use AI-generated version of Al Michaels' voice during Summer Olympics
NBC plans to use an artificial clone of legendary sports broadcaster Al Michaels' voice to narrate its daily streaming recaps of the Summer Olympics in Paris, the company announced Wednesday.
"Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock" will feature narration from a "high-quality A.I. re-creation" of Michaels' voice, trained using his past appearances on NBC in order to match his "signature expertise and elocution," the streaming service announced. (Peacock and NBC News are both owned by NBCUniversal, a unit of Comcast.)
Michaels, 79, told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that he was initially "very skeptical" of the proposal from NBCUniversal executives — until he heard the AI-generated version of his speaking voice, which is capable of greeting viewers by name.
"Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing," he told the magazine in a phone interview last weekend. And it was a little bit frightening."
Stream every moment and every medal of the 2024 Paris Olympics on Peacock, starting with the Opening Ceremony July 26 at 12 p.m. ET.
Michaels said he was stunned by how closely the cloned voice mirrored his style: "It was not only 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 an emeritus role at the network the following year.
Michaels uttered perhaps the most famous six words in the history of sports broadcasting at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics after the U.S. hockey team triumphed over the Soviet Union in a stunning upset: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"
The announcement comes as artificial intelligence technologies attract wider public attention and scrutiny, inspiring equal parts amazement and anxiety. The cloned version of Michaels' voice will be powered by generative A.I. and A.I. voice synthesis technology, according to Peacock.
"Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock" will provide streaming subscribers with a customized playlist featuring highlights of the competitions. Peacock estimates that nearly 7 million personalized variants of the recap could be streamed across the U.S. during the Games, drawing from NBC's 5,000 hours of live coverage.
"Peacock continues to introduce unique customer-first features that strengthen our unmatched leadership in live streaming,” said Kelly Campbell, the president of the streaming platform and head of NBCUniversal's direct-to-consumer unit.
NBCUniversal's streaming service launched nearly four years ago in an increasingly crowded field of competitors that now includes Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, Max and Apple TV+.
Daniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.