If you’ve ever played a game like FIFA or PES, you’ll know that sometimes the pre-recorded commentary leaves you less immersed than you’d like.
A commentator could be reading the team sheet, and suddenly they interrupt themselves by screaming a player’s name.
Or maybe you’ve just heard the same match summary one too many times over the course of a few seasons.
These tiny annoyances made me wonder if there could be a way to improve that experience.
So I decided to try my hand at building a proof of concept which solves these problems.
The flow I wanted was:
- Input some largely unstructured football data (e.g. match stats)
- Have a commentary script generated using those stats, in the style of an experienced commentator
- Then have a realistic-sounding voice read out the generated script
I selected a few different technologies for this project:
- React/Next.js for the frontend and some APIs (I had never built with React before, I am firmly an Angular dev so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about)
- GPT 3.5 Turbo for the commentary generation, as it is both impressive in its generations and cheap per token generated
- ElevenLabs text-to-voice service, to generate a realistic-sounding voice rather than a synthetic robotic voice