BBC Sport to launch GenAI football audio updates

BBC Sport is launching a four-week pilot of AI-generated football audio updates.

Named My Club Daily, the pilot will see fans of five clubs, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Southampton and Plymouth Argyle, able to listen to summaries of news related to their clubs on BBC Sounds, the BBC Sport app/website and BBC social media accounts. These will be daily for Premier League sides Liverpool, Aston Villa and Newcastle United, and biweekly for Championship Southampton and League One Plymouth Argyle. 

These teams have been chosen to test how well the system works across different divisions and areas of the country. 

ChatGPT will be used to organise and reformat existing BBC articles about the clubs to produce a draft audio script, and then ElevenLabs will generate a synthetic voice to read the scripts. The draft script and recording will be checked for accuracy by the BBC’s editorial team before publishing, and all summaries will be clearly labelled as made using AI - as per the AI guidance the BBC published earlier this year. 

While revealing the news, Rhodri Talfan Davies, BBC executive sponsor of Gen AI, said that the BBC has no plans to use synthetic voices routinely, and that the, “new Gen AI tools are impressive, but they will never be able to replicate the depth, humour or humanity of our presenter-led programming in sport or any other genre.”

He added on why the pilot is taking place: “While it’s clear AI tools can support production workflows in many new ways, this pilot relies exclusively on the work of BBC journalists working across BBC Sport and BBC Local. The AI tools will not create stories - as this is not permitted by the BBC under our AI guidelines. Instead, the tools will reformat existing BBC stories that have already been produced by our expert editorial teams.

“However, the cost of making a bespoke daily audio bulletin for every major club using our existing approach would be prohibitively expensive. So, we’re exploring if AI could enable us to do this in a cost-effective way - by rapidly repurposing existing information produced by our colleagues for our tv, radio and online services.  

“The reformatting of existing content allows even more people to enjoy it. For example, football fans with visual impairments might prefer to listen rather than read the latest updates from their club.

“The effectiveness and scalability of this approach will be tested during the course of the pilot.”

He added on the synthetic voices, “In this case, the pilot will explore whether the use of synthetic voice can be deployed to create new, more personalised content experiences, and to test how users respond to them. This will build on the work and learning from other AI pilots - for example, we already use synthetic AI voices on the BBC Weather app to provide highly-localised weather forecasts throughout the day and to support our output on smart speakers.”