“Score! And the crowd gets out of their chairs!”
John Buccigross paused. That wasn’t right. As the new play-by-play voice for EA Sports NHL 27, he knows the terminology better than most — and hockey arenas don’t have chairs. They have seats. An easy distinction for a commentator, but one that AI managed to get wrong.
That small anecdote, recounted by Buccigross on the Chirping Zebras podcast this week and first flagged by Insider Gaming’s Mike Straw, accidentally confirmed what many fans had suspected: Electronic Arts is using generative AI to produce voiceover lines for its in-game commentators in NHL 27.
How AI Slipped Into NHL 27’s Broadcast Booth
Buccigross is one of two new voices for the game. He joins colour commentator Darren Pang — together replacing longtime duo James Cybulski and Cheryl Pounder. EA Sports had positioned the new pairing as a major presentation upgrade, promising “more natural reactions, improved flow, and deeper breakdowns that reflect what’s happening on the ice.”
What the marketing didn’t mention was that some of those voice lines were AI-generated. Rather than recording every possible line in the studio, EA used generative AI to build out commentary using Buccigross’ voice as a model. The broadcaster said he listened to AI samples of himself and came away impressed.
“They’re using some AI now,” he told the podcast. “They played me some stuff back of my voice. It’s like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’”
EA Sports has not made any official statement about the use of AI voiceover in the game.
“If That Means Less Work but the Same Check…”
Buccigross himself seems entirely relaxed about the arrangement — and was disarmingly honest about why.
“If that means less work but the same check, I’ll take it,” he said.
He was quick to add that human oversight still matters. The “chairs vs seats” slip — caught during playback — is exactly the kind of error AI makes when the developers building the game aren’t steeped in sports culture. They knew the words but not the vernacular.
The slip: AI-generated commentary had Buccigross describing fans who “get out of their chairs” during a goal. Hockey arenas have seats. His team caught it during playback and corrected it manually.
“You can make AI smarter,” Buccigross noted. “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.”
Fans Paying £60 for AI-Generated Commentary?
The fan reaction has been blunt. On Reddit’s r/EA_NHL, the thread racked up over 150 comments — most of them frustrated.
“It seems like they’re recycling content from the previous year while introducing a few new commentators, only to rely on AI for some of their comments,” one user wrote. “And they still expect us to pay £60 for this?”
Sports journalist Ryan O’Hara put it more directly on X: “So basically NHL 27 customers were sold revolutionary presentation and a major chunk of it wasn’t even real.”
“So basically NHL 27 customers were sold revolutionary presentation and a major chunk of it wasn’t even real.” — Ryan O’Hara, X
The commercial context matters. NHL 27 arrives on 12 September at full AAA price. EA Sports had leaned on the new commentary team as one of the headline features. Learning that some of those lines came from a generative model rather than a recording session changes the character of that pitch — at least in the eyes of paying customers.
Sports Games and the AI Commentary Question
NHL 27 is not the first sports video game to bring AI into its production pipeline, and it won’t be the last. The technology makes it far cheaper and faster to generate large volumes of commentary — covering every player name, every scenario, every call — than traditional studio recording. The economics are obvious.
What’s different here is that the use of AI wasn’t announced as a feature. It emerged casually, on a podcast, from a commentator who seemed to assume everyone already knew. That gap between what EA marketed and what Buccigross casually confirmed may end up being the bigger story — regardless of whether the voiceover itself sounds any good.
NHL 27 launches on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on 12 September 2026.
