EA Sports Is Using AI to Generate NHL 27 Commentary, but John Buccigross Is

Another day, another story about AI in video games, this time coming from the team behind NHL 27 and its lead commentator, hockey broadcasting legend John Buccigross. Like any AAA sports game, NHL‘s audio presentation features real-world broadcasters calling the games to help them feel as true to real life as possible. 

This time, however, not everything you hear coming out of Bucci’s virtual mouth will have actually been said by his real one. That’s because, according to Buccigross in an interview with the Chirping Zebras podcast, the game will also be making use of AI to synthesize some of his audio commentary:

Buccigross praised the developers’ efforts, saying he was surprised by the quality. “It’s like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’ If that means less work but the same check, I’ll take it.”

Unfortunately, even within that praise came some concerning notes for gamers who question the quality of the final product they receive when development is handed off to AI generation, as Buccigross noted that a common AI complaint — producing content that sounds almost right but just misses the mark of talking like a real human would — was also present in just the clips he was shown:

Sometimes AI will get something wrong. One of the guys was playing it back, and a lot of these guys maybe aren’t hardcore sports fans; they’re video game extraordinates. They’re not always up on the vernacular. So they’re playing back my AI voice, and they’re like, ‘Score! And the crowd gets out of their chairs!’ I was like, ‘No, they’re not chairs. They look like chairs, but we call them seats.’

While some AI opponents distinguish between using the technology when trained on freely provided source material and when sourced through mass-scraping, many others still oppose it. Repetitive commentary is one of the most common complaints in sports video games, so generated lines could offer a fresher gaming experience. Still, if the resulting lines don’t sound like how an announcer would already call a game, it could be a step backward instead of a step forward.