James Alexander Gordon, or ‘JAG’, was one of the most recognised voices on UK radio, best known for reading the classified football results every Saturday on the BBC for almost forty years (1974 to 2013). Millions of football fans and radio listeners will recognise his voice. In particular the way in which he pronounced team names and scores depending on the result. He described being happy for the winning team and sad for the losing one. When the BBC announced the axing of the classified results from their Sports Report programme in August 2022 I was, like many football fans, sad to see it go. There are of course many alternative ways of getting up to the minute results and this project doesn't seek to debate the validity of that decision; but it had me thinking about how technology might be used to recreate an audio results programme using the voice of the most famous and longest serving contributor of them all. James sadly died in 2014. Having discussed the idea and obtained agreement from his family, I have used technology to create an engine that can read the football results as they would have been read by James Alexander Gordon. This Alexa skill demonstrates the positive side of artificial intelligence (AI) based voice cloning and a number of technologies have been used to make this one happen. It is not affiliated or endorsed in any way by the BBC. Your feedback is welcomed to hello@thefootballresults.com. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
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