Peacock’s Best Feature for the Olympics Is Also Its Most Controversial
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe A.I. commentary from Al Michaels was a big test for the technology—and it’s doing pretty dang well., Olympic Games Paris 2024: NBC Peacock’s A.I. Al Michaels is surprisingly good.
Just a few days before this year’s Olympics kicked off in Paris, my colleague Alex Kirshner made the case that the Games represented a real now-or-never moment for Peacock. The 4-year-old NBC streaming service has lagged behind its more established competitors in terms of sheer popularity, customer satisfaction, and market share. So naturally, NBC teased plenty of goodies in the months leading up to the opening ceremony, including ‘Multiview’ livestreaming, special correspondent Snoop Dogg, and NFL-style ‘Gold Zone’ coverage.
Perhaps the most suspect offering, though, was its embrace of the artificial intelligence moment: a virtual likeness of the veteran broadcaster Al Michaels, crafted with his permission, trained to sound just like the iconic commentator, and engineered to offer personalized ‘Daily Olympic Recaps’ to individual fans.
There was certainly a touch of skepticism around Peacock’s ability to offer a suitable replication of the beloved sportscaster at scale, especially as the much-hyped generative A.I. boom keeps producing clunky results. (Not to mention that viewers were so steamed at Google’s Olympics-themed A.I. ad that the company ended up pulling it from the air.) But Michaels himself was impressed by NBC’s early results, as he told Vanity Fair’s Tom Kludt via his real voice: ‘Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing. And it was a little bit frightening.’ Last week, the Washington Post’s Shira Ovide likewise credited the ‘Al Michaels’ recaps as ‘surprisingly good.’ So, as a dedicated Olympics viewer, I knew I had to not just evaluate this for myself, but also figure out why it worked so well, if indeed the rumors were true. And reader: They were.
From my laptop (the feature is not available on the TV app), I accessed Peacock’s ‘Your Daily Olympics Recap’ every morning over the past week. To set it up, I had to enter my name, select the three categories of sports that held my interest, and then the two ‘themes’ for the clips I’d most want to revisit daily (such as ‘viral and trending moments’). I was a bit disappointed to find out later that I could not change these customizations if I so wished, but I understood that type of limitation on a brand-new application that ‘hundreds of thousands of users‘ signed up for, as Peacock’s president informed Fast Company. (By the way, the viewership numbers Peacock has garnered for the Games this year are setting bonkers records.) The recaps, aptly, show up in a URL with the tag ‘voice-ai.’
The feature, sponsored by Microsoft’s ‘A.I. companion’ Copilot, contained anywhere from 14 through 18 segments averaging a minute each, bookended by an intro and signoff from ‘Al Michaels.’ And I have to say: I was astonished at how solid, smooth, and glitch-free they tended to be.
The first sporting category would pop up with three floating clips from the day’s biggest events—produced by the NBC team and pulled here with the help of A.I.—as ‘Al Michaels’ weighed in quickly and deliberately on everything from Malaysian badminton victories to an individual athlete’s knee injury. This would then give way to a series of individual, full-screen highlight reels from the relevant sports and matches—no A.I. voices here, just moments and vibes. Then rinse and repeat with another sporting category, and finally a collection of ‘Must See’ or ‘Viral’ moments that floated by, succinctly contextualized by the voice bot, before it bid farewell with a look ahead to what would feature on NBC prime time that evening.
There were many enjoyable aspects of this program: The Al Michaels voice did not sound like a tinny robot, you could watch full-screen clips of your favorite Olympics events at your convenience, and you could cycle back and forth in the series as you deemed fit. Plus, you got a brand-new one of these at the start of every day, ready to inform you about anything you missed the previous day.
I caught some issues here and there, primarily in the auto-generated subtitles (anyone know a ‘Noah Lyons’? Or anyone with ‘tie parents’ instead of ‘Thai parents’?). I also occasionally found ‘Michaels’ to be a little flatter than I would have expected—for example, while commentating on the France-Egypt football game, the Michaels bot almost muttered that the match ‘was a much happier ending’ for France than Egypt. (It was a similar circumstance when it noted that Germany’s basketball contention provided for ‘another exciting’ development.) The clips, while mostly thrilling, could also be underwhelming; a ‘Must See’ highlight for swimming only showed the competitors diving in, while for others who broke records in climbing or track, I would see maybe 30 seconds of actual action and then another 30 seconds of their celebration, with no more actual sporting highlights.
Still, I was in awe of how quickly and seamlessly these entire presentations came together day after day, drawing from full-on hours of multiple sports to give you a tidy sum-up the very next day. I was aware from Peacock’s own marketing that generative A.I. was ‘used both to re-create the voice of Al Michaels, trained on his past NBC appearances (with his approval), as well as to craft the commentary for the intros and overviews of the clips featuring the A.I. voice.’ There is also an element of human review at the end for final cleanup and editing. But I wanted to learn just how A.I. was fully utilized here for all parts of the equation: the commentary, the clips, the design.
I reached out to NBC folks to find out. They told me that immediately at the end of each day’s Olympics rounds (so, around 4 or 5 p.m. ET), a large language model gets to work synthesizing all sorts of Peacock-available information—schedule, lineups, winners, losers—about the day’s Games and putting out short bits of summary copy for the Al Michaels bot. ‘The way we work with a large language model for the text is to use a type of ‘prompt chaining,’ breaking down what is a very complex task into a series of smaller, connected steps for more accurate and high-quality output,’ John Jelley, senior vice president of product and UX for Peacock, told me. ‘Key inputs include the metadata from the events—what the sport is, who’s the athlete—and pulling in information from the subtitles.’ Human editors then adapt the generated copy to something that the real Al Michaels might say spontaneously, while proofreading the text for any typos—especially those pertaining to athlete names.
The Al Michaels voice also employs a different LLM, one not only trained on Michaels’ past broadcasts but also ‘enhanced’ with the names and word pronunciations expected to be used in this year’s Olympics. The ensuing output likewise earns a round of human review.
‘Our Peacock Product and Data Science teams further optimize how the voice sounds to make it as close as possible to Al Michaels’ by adjusting different variables: the breathing, the tone, speed and intonation,’ said Jelley.
The clips, meanwhile, are pulled from a daily library produced by NBC’s Connecticut-based ‘Highlights Factory’ of human videographers who clip the best moments for use across NBC’s external media (TV cast, YouTube, social media, Peacock reels, etc.). While an A.I. system also helps to pull the appropriate clips for the daily recaps based on matching metadata, human validators give a scan to make sure the predicted clips work for a given sport’s or category’s purpose. These editors at every step of the process hail from across NBC Sports, and they’re working to make sure their A.I. doesn’t mess up in public in the way others’ have. After all, the machines will always be as fallible as the humans who make them function. If an Al Michaels bot that sounds as good as this one still needs this much manpower to resemble a disembodied version of the real guy, it’s hard to see a ‘fully’ automated host gracing the Los Angeles Olympics.
In a way, this is an Olympic team effort all its own, and a salient demonstration of the ways generative A.I. can actually be applied for an additive and efficient use case—not one meant to displace anybody, least of all the great Al Michaels himself. This is not to say that all Olympics A.I. has been so benevolent; just ask the Parisian tourists dealing with the sophisticated A.I.-powered surveillance systems installed all over the city, perhaps likely to stay there even after the Olympics have left town. But at home, at least, you could do a lot worse than robot Al Michaels.
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