EA Sports played John Buccigross a synthetic version of his own voice, and the reaction was approval.
According to the longtime sports broadcaster, the publisher has turned to generative AI to produce in-game commentary voiceover for NHL 27.
The remarks came during an appearance on the Chirping Zebras podcast, where Buccigross was discussing his long-running collaboration with EA Sports on the NHL franchise. He confirmed his return in NHL 27 and noted that generative AI had also been used to build out voice lines.
“They’re using some AI now; they played me some stuff back of my voice,” said Buccigross. “It’s like ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’ If that means less work but the same check, I’ll take it. 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 extrordinares. 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.’
“So, little things like that, you gotta go back and listen because words matter. […] But then you can make AI smarter; in the future they’ll say seats, they won’t say chairs. You have to manually put that in. That was kind of a funny anecdote from the process.”
Chairs, seats and the limits of a synthetic broadcast booth
That small story captures the entire situation. A model can reproduce the rhythm of a hockey call convincingly, then trip over a piece of vocabulary that any regular at the rink would never get wrong. Which means a person still has to be in the room to spot the error and key in the fix.
None of it seems to trouble Buccigross. The workload drops, the payment stays put. That’s difficult math to dispute.
EA is labeling this everywhere except here
Generative AI continues to work its way deeper into game development, to the frustration of a sizeable chunk of the player base. Call of Duty drew criticism last year over AI-generated cosmetic items, calling cards among them. Across its 2026 lineup, EA Sports looks to be embracing the technology.
College Football, Madden and FC this year all display disclosures on their respective Steam pages acknowledging generative AI in development. Because NHL doesn’t ship on Steam, no equivalent disclosure appears for it.
A request for comment has gone to EA regarding exactly how AI is being applied in NHL 27, and whether its role extends past voiceover.
The game itself is treading water
September 11, 2026 is the release date for NHL 27 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game earned a 6/10 in review, summed up as enjoyable but stagnant: it makes little progress over last year’s entry.
“Hockey is one of the greatest sports in the world, and NHL 27 remains enjoyable largely due to that simple fact,” reads an excerpt from the review. “The satisfaction of delivering a bone-crushing hit or snapping a wrist shot past a goaltender is just as effective as ever, and tiny tweaks to stuff like stadiums and music continue to add authenticity in small doses – but there are no illusions that anything truly substantial has changed this year.”
The checks still connect, the arenas sound marginally sharper, and deep inside the audio pipeline a machine is figuring out that fans sit in seats.