2024-06-26T19:09:33.253ZAl Michaels became one of the most recognizable voices in sports broadcasting over a career that spanned decades. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)NEW YORK — Al Michaels left the NBC broadcast booth in 2022, but he will return to the network for this summer’s Olympics. Or at least his voice will.NBC announced Wednesday that an artificial intelligence version of Michaels’s voice will be available during the Paris Games on its streaming platform, Peacock. Viewers will have the opportunity to choose what kinds of highlights and sports they would like to see in a morning roundup package from the day before, and Michaels’s voice will narrate it.Brian Roberts, the CEO of NBC’s parent company, Comcast, said it was a “fun” use of A.I. at a demonstration for reporters at Rockefeller Center. The idea came from a brainstorming session of how to use technology in the presentation of the upcoming games. A team of NBCU editors will review all content for quality assurance and accuracy before recaps are made available to users.Michaels told Vanity Fair: “Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing. And it was a little bit frightening.”Michaels called one of the most famous Olympics moments in history, narrating the United States’ hockey victory over the Soviet Union in 1980. “Do you believe in miracles?” he famously shouted as the clock wound down. He spent another two decades with ABC, becoming one of the most recognizable voices in sports broadcasting, before moving to NBC to call the NFL. For anyone with a Peacock subscription, Michaels’s voice will be available when the Olympics start to narrate a morning digest of highlights based on a viewers’ preferences that include their favorite sports and type of coverage their interested in, such as behind-the-scenes or viral moments. According to Roberts, there could be some 7 million variations of what Michaels might say to introduce the clips.Peacock’s team of engineers and data scientists used a Large Language Model and voice synthesis technology to create the Michaels AI based on his many previous appearances on NBC. Michaels agreed to lend his voice when NBC asked his permission.The recreation of Michaels’s voices comes months after both actors and writers engaged in prolonged strikes in Hollywood. A key issue was the future use of artificial intelligence.Rupal Patel, a professor of communications science and disorders at Northeastern University who also founded a synthetic voice company, said this kind of work is becoming more common and, under the proper conditions, doesn’t raise any ethical questions.“You’re seeing this happen more where voice actors are consenting, and they’re also getting a part of the royalties from their work,” she said. “There aren’t alarm bells because the actor is benefiting from it financially, and they wouldn’t be able to do all these recordings themselves. The whole idea is scale. The AI voice is working while they are doing another gig, in theory.”