TLDR: The BBC is launching ‘My Club Daily,’ a four-week generative AI pilot on BBC Sounds, the BBC Sport app/website, and social media. This initiative will provide daily or biweekly AI-generated audio summaries of news for fans of five football clubs: Liverpool, Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Southampton, and Plymouth Argyle. The pilot aims to explore personalized content experiences and production efficiencies, with human editorial oversight ensuring accuracy and transparency.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Sport division is set to introduce an innovative four-week pilot program named ‘My Club Daily,’ leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to deliver personalized football audio updates. This initiative, launching on August 14, 2025, will be accessible via BBC Sounds, the BBC Sport app/website, and various BBC social media platforms.
The pilot will cater to fans of five selected football clubs: Premier League teams Liverpool, Aston Villa, and Newcastle United will receive daily audio summaries, while Championship club Southampton and League One’s Plymouth Argyle will get biweekly updates. These clubs were chosen to assess the system’s efficacy across different divisions and geographical regions.
At the core of ‘My Club Daily’ is the integration of advanced AI tools. ChatGPT will be utilized to organize and reformat existing BBC articles about the participating clubs, transforming them into draft audio scripts. Subsequently, ElevenLabs will generate a synthetic voice to narrate these scripts. A crucial aspect of the workflow is the mandatory human oversight: the draft scripts and their AI-generated recordings will undergo rigorous accuracy checks by the BBC’s dedicated editorial team before publication. Furthermore, all summaries produced through this pilot will be explicitly labeled as AI-generated, adhering to the BBC’s AI guidelines published earlier this year.
Rhodri Talfan Davies, Director of Nations at the BBC, shed light on the rationale behind the pilot. He emphasized that while AI tools are valuable for supporting production workflows, ‘this pilot relies exclusively on the work of BBC journalists working across BBC Sport and BBC Local.’ Davies clarified that ‘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.’ He also highlighted the cost-effectiveness, noting that ‘the cost of making a bespoke daily audio bulletin for every major club using our existing approach would be prohibitively expensive.’ Regarding the use of synthetic voices, Davies stated, ‘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,’ drawing parallels with the successful deployment of synthetic AI voices on the BBC Weather app for localized forecasts.
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This pilot represents the BBC’s ongoing exploration into how AI can enhance content delivery and audience engagement, while maintaining journalistic integrity and transparency.
